ANR Cross Sector Partnerships

Funder: Agence Nationale de Recherche (project ANR-22-CE26-0009)     
Duration: 03/2023-08/2025     
Team: Lea Stadtler (Principal Investigator), Eduardo Hernandez Melgar (Post-Doc, Xenia Becker (PhD), and Adriane MacDonald     
Advisory Board: Barbara Gray, Luk Van Wassenhove, Charles-Clemens Ruling

Project Context

Cross-sector partnerships (CSPs) have emerged as an important means to address pressing societal challenges: Based on the collaboration across business, public, and civil society sectors, CSPs are expected to enable greater social effectiveness (i.e. addressing the social challenge and fostering positive societal impact) than unilateral or intra-sector actions. While previous studies in management research have examined the challenge of aligning diverse partner interests and ways of working in CSPs, insights into their social effectiveness remain surprisingly scarce. Initial evidence however suggests that CSPs do not necessarily live up to their potential, such as by failing to deliver on their targeted goals or by provoking beneficiary dependence. Consequently, this project seeks to explore levers to strengthen CSPs’ social effectiveness.

Project Structure

Cross-PASSE is structured around three research pillars:

1. Analyzing and learning from the “dark side” of CSPs, including negative effects resulting for partner organizations, target groups, their communities, and the larger societal systems in which CSPs are embedded
2. Examining companies’ evolutions from business-centric to society-centric approaches in their CSP engagement
3. Investigating and learning from CSP closure dynamics and strategies through which social effects are sustained or eventually undermined.

Expected Outcomes

By integrating these insights into multi-level process frameworks, this project establishes much-needed connections between the discourse on CSP management and research insights into the addressing of societal grand challenges. From a societal perspective the project insights will help managers anticipate the challenges of and opportunities for strengthening CSPs’ social impact and, as a result, use this type of sector-spanning collaboration more effectively. Overall, advancing the CSP discourse and encouraging a more comprehensive view on these partnerships’ social effectiveness is critical at a time where the international community strongly advocates CSPs as a pivotal tool for achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.