As South Africa sails deeper into turbulent
economic waters, calls for improved collaboration between the public and the
private sector grow ever more urgent. Finance minister Malusi Gigaba touched on
the issue in Parliament recently, when he described better business-government
relations as a crucial factor in government’s drive to include millions of
poverty-stricken South Africans in the economy.
While there are plenty of reasons to be
sceptical of the ANC-led government’s new found enthusiasm for broad-based
economic change, it happens that the finance minister’s wish for closer
co-operation between the public and the private sector coincides with a rising
trend in businesses worldwide to pursue partnerships outside their normal
spheres of operation.
Such cross-sector partnerships are usually
driven by multiple factors. Occasionally, the challenges that companies face
are too big or complex to take on by themselves. Sometimes they may not have
the required skills or resources to tackle a specific problem, or they may
simply want to spread the risks involved in doing so. Enhanced efficiency – and
the avoidance of duplication – are other recognised benefits of
collaborating across multiple sectors to solve problems.
More recently, businesses in South Africa
have begun to wake up to the reality that cross-sector partnerships may be a
crucial investment in their own future prosperity. Justin Smith, the Group Head
of Sustainability at Woolworths, puts it succinctly when he describes the work
Woolworths has been doing with farming communities near Ceres in the Western
Cape to improve the quality of water in the catchment areas.
“It’s very simple,” says Smith. “If we
still want to be selling fruit ten years from now, we need to find ways of
working with multiple stakeholders to ensure a consistent, good-quality water
supply.”
Smith was talking at a meeting of the
Network for Business Sustainability South Africa (NBS-SA) hosted by the UCT
Graduate School of Business last month. While there was much nodding and
agreement among participants that collaborative engagement between organisations
in different sectors – and even between different businesses in the same sector
– is essential for boosting sustainability initiatives, the conversation often
turned to the challenges that such partnerships bring.
For starters, people may have very
different ideas about what the partnership they have entered into means. Vanessa
Otto-Mentz, Head of Group Strategy at Santam, explains the importance of
managing expectations during a recent collaborative project they ran with the
Eden District Municipality aimed at mitigating the risks of fire and flooding
in local communities.
“People often
think we have all these facilities and resources, but we don’t,” she says.
“It’s rather about asking the right questions, or about helping the
municipality to prioritise. In some sense it’s more of a managerial
intervention – we tried to help the municipality to take responsibility for its
own risk management programme.”
At the same time, however, companies should
be careful not to foist their expertise on unsuspecting collaboration partners.
Brigitte Burnett, Head of Sustainability at Nedbank, cautions that a
paternalistic attitude can lead to severe distrust among the different parties
involved in a cross-sector partnership. In a recent project aimed at developing
financial acumen among the local populace in Magaliesburg, she says, Nedbank took
care to partner with an investment team on the ground that was already
well-connected to the community, in order reduce the risk of paternalism.
Another issue that frequently crops up is
the problem of implementing the sustainability goals that often drive
cross-sector collaboration within a company's existing corporate structure.
Reflecting on some of the challenges they have experiencied in an agricultural
partnership with local communities in AmaMpondo district in the Eastern Cape,
Martie Steyn, Senior Communications Specialist at AngloGold Ashanti, explains
that it can be very difficult to determine in a practical sense what role such
initiatives should play in company policy. Is it merely supportive, or is it an
integral part of the company's business strategy?
Even if CEOs and COOs increasingly see the
value of pursuing sustainability initiatives through cross-sector partnerships,
it is no simple matter to translate that value into the everyday operational
activities of a business.
Fortunately, promising new tools are being
developed that can help companies to move on from an outdated view of
sustainability as compliance, and closer to a practice that integrates
sustainability-driven partnerships as a core element in business strategy.
One
such tool is based on the work of the Embedding Project, a public benefit
research project that uses cutting-edge social science and modelling techniques
to help companies identify the most efficient ways to embed sustainability
practices in their operations.
“Our model allows companies to figure out
where they can have the biggest impact, at the lowest cost,” says Stephanie
Bertels, a Canadian academic and founder of the Embedding Project. Bertels, who
is also a member of the Network for Business Sustainability, feels strongly
that a shift in emphasis to context-driven sustainability can lead to
significant benefits for companies. “We’re showing companies how they can set
the narrative in such a way that it makes sense to both the business, and the
communities they’re partnering with,” she explains.
Despite numerous potential pitfalls, then,
it seems there may indeed be some scope for collaborations between the public
and the private sector to bear fruit locally.
Stephen Elliott-Wetmore, Manager for
Corporate Partnerships and Innovation at the World Wildlife Fund South Africa
(WWF), reveals that the CEOs of South African companies have a reputation for
their willingness to engage with NGOs and other stakeholders beyond the strict
ambit of their business practices. And these kinds of engagement are precisely
what is needed to reinvent the relationship between business and the public
wellbeing that our country so sorely requires.
Cross-sector partnerships are vital
mechanisms for developing innovative responses to shared problems, says Ralph
Hamann, Academic Director of NBS-SA and a Professor at the UCT Graduate School
of Business.
But it is also crucial to remind ourselves that there are no short
cuts to innovation. It is, rather, something that emerges when we take the time
to grapple with the many, seemingly intractable differences among all those
with a stake in a particular situation or environment.
And in the case of South Africa, that means
all of us, regardless of whether we think of ourselves as belonging to the
public or the private sector. Smuts is a Postdoctoral Researcher in