Accelerating Transformative Partnerships for Sustainable Development: Uncovering the Power of Representation

Multi-stakeholder partnerships have been promoted by the UN as an important part of the solution to implement the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). With the report from the General Secretary, Our Common Agenda, and its call to boost partnerships, there is an even stronger emphasis on this agenda. Since the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, there has been an evolving body of research on the effectiveness of partnerships, and since the 2012 Rio+20 summit also research on their legitimacy. This paper analyses the partnership agenda pursued by the UN by scrutinizing the governance of SDGs through multi-stakeholder partnerships with a focus on power relations using governmentality as an analytical framework, thereby offering a new perspective to the existing literature on partnerships. It zooms in on The 2030 Agenda Partnership Accelerator, a collaborative initiative between United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) and The Partnering Initiative (TPI) intended to support country driven Partnership Platforms for SDGs. The paper seeks to answer the questions: How are partnerships defined and categorized, that is, represented by the Partnership Accelerator? How do these definitions and categorizations affect the knowledge collected and disseminated about partnerships? What do these representations tell us about the power structures embedded in the Partnership Accelerator and the subjects (stakeholders) they aim to govern? And how does this affect the governance of the partnerships? Through a discourse analysis of the content on the website of the Partnership Accelerator, including handbooks, webinars, and assessment reports, the paper exposes the various ways in which multi-stakeholder partnerships are represented in the UN. The analysis shows how these representations enable a certain kind of governance and governmental technologies while excluding others, and hence the possibilities to use the acceleration of partnerships as a mode of transformation. The result of the analysis suggests that more research is needed in order to identify how power structures play out in practice in the implementation process of UN’s multi-stakeholder partnerships and how different stakeholders navigate these structures.