 Hello everybody. Most welcome to this session on partnerships for accelerated action and on NCGG linkages. And my name is Karin Beckstrom. I'm a professor in political science at Stockholm University and also at the Institute for Future Studies in Stockholm. And I have the pleasure to moderate this session on an extremely timely theme. It's hosted by Stockholm Environment Institute and Stockholm University and the Institute for Future Studies and also other universities I will come into. And we have a very exciting 90 minutes in front of us. We will focus on a crucially important issue, namely how multi-stakeholder partnerships and the STGs can be vehicles for accelerating implementation of the 2030 agenda and the STGs. And in the light of the last summer's STG summit and the Global Sustainable Development Report, the prospects look rather bleak. There is a large both action and implementation gap. So what we will focus in this session, how can multi-stakeholder partnerships or public-private partnerships be used? How can synergies be maximized and conflicts and trade-offs minimized to achieve this? And how can we in general between the STGs achieve greater synergies to scale up implementation? And so we will focus on this issue that is also crucial as we are heading towards the future for the summit, the summer. And I should say that this side event will present preliminary research funding from numerous projects at Stockholm Environment Institute and at Stockholm University. And myself, I'm leading a project on transformative partnerships that looks, it's halfway through a four-year project that looks on the synergies and effectiveness and also legitimacy of these partnerships to what extent MSP for STGs are transparent and accountable. And on that note, I will briefly show our excellent presentations in the next presentation, those who will present in the next slides. So we will have two sessions, one starting with mapping the state of the play of STGs and multi-stakeholder partnerships in the 2030 agenda. And our first speaker at the Stockholm Environment Institute is Lynn Jernberg. She's a research fellow at SCI. And we will get information on how in the Global Sustainable Development Report these STGs are synergized or not. Secondly, we have in the next presentation in the first session, we have Montserrat Collofon and Cornelia Fast, both PhD candidates at Vrier University in Amsterdam. And they will showcase some very recent research on how multi-stakeholder partnerships can be actually interlinked or not in the novel dataset on this. Then we will have a discussion, hopefully inviting the audience on following these presentations and a panel discussion and also involving the audience. Then we will move to the second section featuring two presenters, David Prescott. He is a creative director at the Partnering Initiative and David Horan at the Stakeholder Forum for Sustainable Future and also an assistant professor at Trinity College in Dublin. And then we will finally have Magdalena Bexel from Lund University. And this session will be more forward-looking evaluating both the effectiveness and the legitimacy and the accountability of the partnerships. And also this session, we will have a question and answer and discussion afterwards. So on this note, I think we should just get into the stuff of STGs and partnerships. And I should also say that you can post all your questions, comments and reflections in the chat and we will as much as it's possible to accommodate and forward them to the speakers. On that note, I'm very happy to leave the floor to our first presenter, Lynn. Thank you very much, Karin, for this introduction. And first of all, I would also, on behalf of SEI, as one of the co-hosts of this event today, like to extend my very warm welcome to all the participants that are joining us today. I look forward very much to interesting discussions in the coming hour and a half. So to start this session off, we can go to the next slide, please. I would like to share some recent research that reveals global and recurring patterns of STG interactions, those synergies and trade-offs at global level. I will also show one practical way forward and how to understand and manage interlinkages by introducing an SEI tool called STG synergies. And the context here is that we are now more than halfway through in the lifetime of the STGs. And as Karin was speaking to as well, we are still in most countries seeing limited progress or even reversed progress in certain areas. So a key question for policymakers, for scientists, for practitioners, is how we can accelerate progress in the remaining years of the agenda. And one way to do this is to focus on interlinkages. So if we want to address challenges such as biodiversity loss, climate change and rising inequalities, this will require balancing between various different environmental, economic and social objectives. And the 2030 agenda offers a comprehensive framework to think about these challenges in a systematic and integrated way. And even though the STGs are defined individually as 17 goals, their design is also clearly including many interlinkages. So with this in mind, it's important to identify interventions that can leverage some of the many potential synergies between the STGs. And it's equally important to be mindful of areas where there are trade-offs or goal conflicts. So taking this systemic perspective on the STGs with a focus on interlinkages across areas and sectors is one of the keys that can help unlock progress. So firstly, I would like to share some recent research that has been led by my SEI colleague, Tires Benik. And this was published just a few months ago and it was also included as a background paper to the Global Sustainable Development Report in 2023. And this is the first systematic synthesis of how the STGs interact at global level. And it's based on a literature review of 51 scientific articles. And the questions that this research has tried to answer is whether there are STGs that are universally conflicting and creating trade-offs across different contexts and countries. And similarly, if there are STGs that are consistently synergistic regardless of context. So if we take a look at this figure here and focus specifically on the pie charts, we can identify goals that have a consistently strong positive influence on other goals. We can go to the next slide please. And this is a case for, oh sorry, go back to the previous one please. There, thank you. So the goals that are currently generating synergies are related to education, to water and to partnerships. So these are areas that seem to represent safe investments, if you will, for governments across different contexts. We can also identify STGs that seem to generate trade-offs consistently. And this goes for the STGs on zero hunger and agriculture, economic growth and cities. So these are goals that might require particular attention. These negative impacts must be mitigated or at least priorities must be actively and transparently made. We also see a few goals that are consistently negatively impacted by progress in other areas. So this goes for the STGs related to oceans and life on land. And here we believe that this one might be one of the explanations as to why we're seeing particularly poor progress globally on the environmental goals and the environmental dimension of the 2030 agenda. So here a better integration of the environmental dimension decision-making is needed to mitigate the trade-offs that are caused by the implementation of socio-economic STGs. And finally, a short word of caution here is that we know that the STG and the STG interactions are highly context-specific. So this type of global assessment that I just presented here shouldn't be considered necessarily a truthful picture of any particular context. But it can still be useful as a starting point for decision-makers also at local level and national level that are tasked with STG implementation. Because this information is highlighting that there are certain STGs that are more likely than others to generate synergies and trade-offs. And that might therefore need particular attention. And now we can go to the next slide, please. So this is taking me to my second part of the presentation. So the scientific community and other actors have by now developed quite a diversity of tools and methods for understanding and managing STG interactions in practice, including ones that allow for more context-specific understandings of interlinkages. And one of SEI's contributions to this collective toolbox is called the STG synergies. And this is a method and online tool that can support decision-makers in identifying synergies and trade-offs in a particular context. So we've used this in quite a few different contexts, ranging from the European level. We've looked at the EU level, regional level. We've looked at national level, for example, as part of the Swedish voluntary national review. It's also been used in collaboration with municipalities, for example, local level. We can go to the next slide, please. And an STG synergies approach is typically happening in three different steps, where in the first step we would select the targets that wouldn't be included in the analysis. And this can be either the STG goals or targets. It can be localized versions of the STGs or it can be really any other type of sustainability objective or policy objective or activity. In the second step, we would then assess the interactions across all of the different combinations of targets that we have included in the analysis. Take the next slide, please. And this would typically be done through a participatory process involving cross-sectoral expertise, but it could also be expert-led and desktop-based. And if we go to the next slide, please. This type of matrix shown here is one of the main results and outcomes that we get from this type of analysis. So this gives a quite quick overview of where there are positive and negative interactions in this particular context. So the blue dots here are representing synergies and the red ones and orange ones are representing trade-offs. So this type of analysis then, if we go to the next slide, can be used to support more coherent policies and priority settings. So we can answer questions such as which targets have a catalytic effect and where are potential trade-offs. And we can also do a few more sophisticated analyses of these results. I'm not going to go into all of those details, but just to give one example, we have a clustering function where we can ask the tool to draw out groups of targets that are particularly closely interlinked in this particular context. And you see an example of this to the bottom right. And this type of information can then be used to identify areas where partnerships or other cross-sectoral collaborations could be particularly important for addressing trade-offs and synergies across different sectors. So this is really my segue to the next presentation, which I know will focus specifically on partnerships for addressing interlinkages. So before I round off, I would just also like to mention that with the SDGs synergies tool, we are currently developing a new feature that will allow us to look at transboundary impacts or what's sometimes called geographical spillover effects. So effects that are emerging in one country, for example, but the impacts are happening elsewhere. It would also allow for looking at multi-level impacts across local and regional level, for example. So if you're interested in either of those topics or in general in the tool or, for that matter, SEIs research more broadly, you're more than welcome to reach out. We're always open for new collaborations. And with that, I say thank you very much, and I hand the word back over to you, Karin. Thank you very much for that very good overview. And I think we have lots of things for the question and answers on this. We want to know more about the synergies and also the conflicts and trades-off. Without further ado, I think we should just move over to our next presentation by Montserrat Collaforn and Cornelia Fast, our multi-stakeholder partnerships addressing the STG linkages. Please take the floor. Hello, everyone. Thank you so much, Karin. I hope everyone can hear me all right. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Montserrat Collaforn, and together with my colleague, Cornelia Fast, we will discuss the question of whether multi-stakeholder partnerships seem to be addressing these STG interlinkages by presenting a little bit of our ongoing research within the FORMAS-funded Transformative Partnerships 2030 project that got indeed. So if we could go to my first slide, please. Yes, the next one, please. So the departing point of our research is the existence of, let's say, contrasting attitudes and evidence regarding partnerships potential to contribute towards STG implementation. So on the one hand, and I will start with the pitfalls at the bottom, research on partnerships has found limited evidence on their effectiveness and also some instances of greenwashing or some even talk about rainbow washing, which is like STG washing. And additionally, there's also some concerns that have been raised regarding the legitimacy and accountability of partnerships, especially in regard to the involvement and influence of private actors. On the other hand, and judging by the global narrative on STG implementation, some of the promising expectations include, for example, the ability to fill governance gaps through more versatile governance mechanisms, the ability to accelerate implementation by contributing to systemic transformations, and of course, related to that, the ability to bring about synergistic governance as communicated through the STG 17 called partnership partnering for the goals. So the importance of the last point is often highlighted in academic publications and flagship reports, such as the Global Sustainable Development Report, also known as GSDR, which was recently mentioned in the previous presentation. And as many of you are aware, this report identifies six entry points for transformation. So if you could go to the next slide, please. So the GSDR is really only one of several existing frameworks trying to organize or prioritize action to maximize impacts across the STGs. But in this case or here, we take it as a good example just to visualize this type of demand for specific SDG interlinkages or SDG nexuses, as they're often called, to enable transformation. So in this case, zooming into the different entry points, we find that each one of them consists of a group of so-called transformative shifts, which in turn are closely linked to a group of SDGs and specific indicators. And so one of our objectives in this project is to understand the role of partnerships, specifically multistakeholder partnerships, in transformation, which leads us to ask, next slide, please. Yeah, so it leads us to ask whether partnerships are indeed addressing the SDG interlinkages identified in the large body of recommendations from scientific publications. So my colleague, Cornelia, will take it from here and briefly explain our approach in answering this question. Yes, thank you, Montserrat. Next slide, please. Thank you. Yeah, so as a starting point to answer this question that we used, raised, we developed the Transform 2030 data sets. And as illustrated in this image, it departs from the UNDESA's SDG action platform, which two years ago comprised close to 7,000 entries. And so by looking at those and filtering out duplicates, identifying those that actually address or seem to address two or more SDGs, those that show that they have some type of activity or indicate what their activity is, and understanding whether they meet the criteria for transnational multistakeholder partnerships, we arrived at a group of close to 400 multistakeholder partnerships that we decided to take a closer look at. And so in previous iterations of this presentation, we have kind of presented descriptive statistics showing that only actually a part of those close to 400 are actually active, and that they primarily engage with functions such as knowledge, dissemination rather than financing, and much more. However, today we are focusing on whether this group of multistakeholder partnerships are addressing SDG interlinkages and how they are connecting SDGs. So next slide, please. So what we arrived at is that we mapped the MSPs entries on this SDG action platform, based on the vocabulary of the SDGs. So our aim here was to identify the so-called supply of SDG interlinkages or SDG connections that are being made by MSPs. And so this figure might look messy to you at a first glance, however, it's actually quite straightforward. Each line in this circle represents how often two SDGs are being connected by MSPs. And so the frequency is kind of indicated by the thickness of the line, but I will draw attention to some of the key results which are highlighted in this colored lines. First of all, SDG 13 on climate action, SDG 14 on life below water, as well as SDG 15 on life on land are the most commonly addressed together as a trio. Similarly, SDG 13 on climate action is also connected to many other SDGs, and that also holds true for SDG 3 on health that is connected to as many as six other SDGs. On the contrary, some of the goals like SDG 2 on hunger and SDG 5 on gender equality are only connected to one other SDG by these MSPs. And also it's worth pointing out that SDG 12 on responsible consumption and production as well as SDG 9 on innovation are the least connected by these MSPs. And so when we start looking at this and matching it towards the findings or the suggestions for pathways in the GSDR, but also other research such as Benek et al, we arrive at a set of key messages presented on the next slide. So first, it is worth just re-emphasizing this finding that's only a small proportion of the 7000 or so entries that are showcasing their commitments to the SDGs are actually being are actually still active. Second, when it comes to the connection specifically, environmental and social SDGs notably between climate change and biodiversity and health and education are especially well connected. In contrast, MSPs might may be missing out on addressing important SDGs such as the one on responsible consumption and production which you saw in the GSDR entry points also are frequently mentioned or indicated. And if we match these results to the wider literature, it seems that MSPs current characteristics they hold and the current SDG connections they make may not yet make them fit for purpose in terms of tackling this synergistic approach in a holistic way. And so going forward to draw conclusions about the kind of supply or whether the supply matches the demand for prioritization, we need to still look further into kind of the universe of suggestions for how to prioritize. And as Lynn mentioned prior, this really includes taking into account the national and local level situations that influence what synergies and trade-offs that occur. And so for the Transform 2030 research project, this means that we strive to examine whether the current connections that we see in this circle graph if they actually generate synergies or trade-offs and how that affects the 2030 agenda at large. And so the next slide please. Just to finish off, I want to thank you for your attention and looking forward to your thoughts on this in the Q&A. And if you'd like to read more about our findings, we encourage you to visit our website, our publications, but also to reach out via LinkedIn or email directly. Thank you. Thank you very much, Lynn Montserrat and Cornelia for an excellent overview of the state of play of MSP and the SDGs in general. And it's interesting to observe the or distressing to observe the critical, I mean gaps in both action and of certain SDGs such as those on hunger, consumption, agricultural life of land. So we have seven years to go and now this is just to kick off and I should also say a general panel discussion. And I also want to encourage the audience to come up with questions in the chat, any question to the panelists. But I want to kick off with actually a first question to Cornelia Montserrat on the last presentation on the role of partnerships and linkages between them. So we have about seven years to the end of the agenda 2030 and you have these results where you have identified trade-offs and synergies and but also conflicts. What would you say are the major roadblocks? What role can partnerships play for countries to better address these linkages? And maybe something if you know from your research, what are the roadblocks? Thank you for the interesting question to kick this discussion off. Maybe I will give it a go first and connecting to the research that I'm doing within this project, but for my own PhD. So the aspect I'm problematizing there is that many partnerships are working in a fashion that is not fit for purpose. So in a way their task now is to address these systemic problems. However, they don't work with the tools that allow them to correctly visualize, understand this type of interlinkages, synergies, trade-offs and conflicts. So this of course connects very well with Lin's presentation because I've been following how you've been developing this SDGs synergies tool and there are a couple other ones, but I think vastly practitioners have not yet embraced this type of tools and other existing tools. So there may be a room for improvement in that regard. I don't know if the other two speakers would like to add something. Maybe I will jump in quickly here to build on what you said, Montserrat. I think one important when we talk about roadblocks from what I see is that there's a tendency to want to reinvent the wheel and initiate new partnerships and and often not motivated by concrete kind of incentives or objectives. They just do it to do it and I think in that sense it's important to remember that learning from what's already existing and building up on that might be key instead of reinventing the wheel just as a comment. Thank you and Lin on your presentation in a way it's very promising with this tool that has possibility to identify these linkages and what would you say in light of this synergistic intervention proposed in the Global Sustainable Development Report. We see this patterns of linkages between SDGs partnerships. Are there any new areas where you think it's a better prospect for countries to scale up synergies and minimize trade-offs and which are these areas if you've seen any and what could facilitate further synergetic interventions? Yeah thank you Karin for a very interesting and thought-provoking question I think. So one aspect that I touched upon a little bit also in my presentation is the environmental dimension. As I mentioned we do see that this is at the global level sort of lagging behind substantially in terms of progress. So I think that this I mean the environmental dimension in general should really be more integrated in decision-making not only concerning sort of other environmental issues but the sort of broader spectrum of sustainability issues that the agenda represents. I think some of the research done on SDG interlinkages so far is also there's also still a limited understanding I think of the role that the environmental SDGs are playing in supporting the other more socioeconomic SDGs so that I think is also an avenue that deserves much more attention. So how the sort of well-functioning ecosystems are really the foundation for all of the social and economic objectives. So that would be at least one message from my end. Thank you so much. I will just just one second because I'm looking into the questions from the audience. Just a second. Okay I will read this up as I see it. It's coming from thank you John Armstrong who says in my experience the issue is that the partnerships themselves are not equitable. Not all partners enter such arrangements on equal footing which means that one partner is usually more powerful than the rest. These thus are not partnerships but rather vehicles for one parties perspective and priorities. The bigger question is partnerships take money effort time and patience to be maintained. The partnership itself is not an outcome so who effectively manages the partnerships and this is essentially thankless and difficult work. I think that's a very good question that concerns power. I mean I'm a political scientist so we always ask about power in partnerships and equity. Lin or Cornelia or Montserrat who wants to take on this question. I mean maybe I can offer I don't know if I have an answer to the question but maybe I have a perspective on this. Yeah as I mentioned on my introduction this is a this is a criticism or a concern that has been raised for a long time in the literature regarding partnerships that indeed there's power struggles within the the partnerships. I just wanted to share that when we were forming the data set that we're using for the analysis in our project we found out that partnerships also look extremely different. We talk about partnerships but they are let's say different creatures of different sizes and forms and different types of members etc. So we do see these instances of one powerful actor bringing together some other let's say orbiting actors but they are the ones who have the main say whereas others are much more balanced and much more yeah in equilibrium and reaching a much yeah let's say a better concept form of consensus within the partnership or at least it looks like that from from the outside. So I think this is also an aspect that we're trying to cover a little bit in our research trying to go beyond just like the large end type of research and peers through and interview actors and find out how these dynamics work within the partnership because indeed there may be something there in terms of design of a partnership that can also be extracted as a recommendation of what is a better or worse setup for as a design for the partnership which could lead to success or lack thereof. Thank you very much Cornelia and in other reflections from the panel on this issue. Otherwise I actually think that the question we will come back to that because later in in the second segment also Magdalena Bexel will talk about the legitimacy and accountability of partnerships and it's a core if I want to make a very long story short 20 years of research of partnerships among many academics have shown these gaps in participation in equity and inclusion. So I mean largely the partnerships in a way mirror the world at large where there has been very systemic gaps in inclusion from also marginalized stakeholders. So I don't see any questions for now on in the chat. So I actually think we will move forward to the next segment on which is actually about how can partnerships be made more synergistic effective and legitimate and we have what we plan to have three presentations and I'm a bit uncertain if one of the presenters turned up. Is Dave Prescott here? No he's not that's very unfortunate of course we looked forward to that but these things happen but the good thing is that we have two very good presenters they get a little bit more time on this very crucial topic how we can accelerate and make partnerships more effective but also address the critical which I referred to earlier or the question referred to earlier accountability and legitimacy gaps. So on that note our next presenter is David Horan both I would say research both of course an academic but who's also have experience from the stakeholder forum on the partnership practice and David will speak about on the importance of having broad based partnerships that could be more collaborative inclusive and multi-sectoral. Please David share your research insights we look forward to that thanks. Thank you very much Karen for the kind introduction and thank you for Lynn for the invite and for organizing this very interesting event and I'd like to compliment the speakers for their presentations. I think increasingly participatory tools are an important approach for making progress in this area and it's very useful to have the findings from the Transformed 2030 project which I think shows that multi-stakeholder partnerships can account for interlinkages but there's plenty of untapped potential there to do better and so I was asked just to speak about research I have done on the role of partnerships in enabling an integrated approach and I'll mostly base my presentation on a article that was published in the special issue of sustainability science titled tradeoffs and synergies between SDG goals and targets that appeared in 2022 and the link can be found at the end of the slides. Okay next slide please Okay so what so I particularly like a recent there was an article in the IISD Knowledge Hub from the Stockholm Environment Institute which calls for a need to focus more on the complexity dimension of the SDGs and I think this is a very important in the next seven years of implementation in a sense we haven't really looked at the the potential of the the 2030 agenda and the SDG framework as a way to actually deal with complex issues that are increasingly and very much prevalent in today's societies so obviously there's been a lot of focus on the interlinkages and integrated approaches but there are other dimensions ways to think about complexity such as societal complexity who are the stakeholders to be involved you know what is the distribution of responsibilities concepts around shared responsibilities so someone who's made a significant contribution on that angle is Rob van Tulder in his recent book on principles of sustainable business which could be called principles of sustainable organizations and I encourage you to have a look at that when you have a chance it basically systematically applies wicked problems analysis to the SDGs and so just to start my presentation think about you know why are we interested in integrated approaches what's you know it's not just the you know why what's the what's the instrumental value of them and so I think it's it's basically a way to transform what's often is an unsustainable intervention into one which is less unsustainable and generally in the area of sustainability there are no perfect solutions so any solution you can think of usually generates a range of positive impacts which we call synergies with the the SDG framework and usually there's some trade-offs and basically making that intervention more less unsustainable typically involves requires additional actions of some sort or other and this is where we have the term transformative actions which is really about moving beyond siloed approaches or just you know one one action at a time so you know there's lots of examples of this and we've we as a society I think have had to learn this the hard way if you take taken France with the yellow vest movement the French government implemented a few tax to try and make progress on its climate commitments the impact of that was it had negative spillovers on livelihoods in rural areas so interlinkage with SDG one and how this came to the attention was true protest movement and ultimately the you know the tax was not able to be implemented because of this so that's one example other ones you think of expanding renewable energy typically has some form of negative externality with decent work and regional economies SDG 8 SDG 9 in the form of you know what we now call just transition coal miners or coal workers being put out of work so in all of those case you typically require a portfolio of actions you know a carbon tax with transfers or a you know renewable energy supports with some type of retraining for the green economy and usually at the core of it usually there's some type of partnership is required to realize those those benefits and I think that's where the the partnerships come into play and so you know if you think about one example that's often touted as a good intervention you know that generates mostly synergies and sending girls to school and that's true but you need a lot of additional interactions to make that happen our actions to make that happen so you know things around you need to look at the linkage with SDG 1 you know kind of can the family afford to send the kids to school can they get the school safely SDG 9 SDG 16 at school are they sufficiently nourished in order to actually pay attention to what they're trying to learn SDG 2 are is are they receiving a quality education SDG 4 and so on so actually you know realizing the the benefits can be much more than just the simple siloed action of making it affordable to go to school or or building extra capacity with with schools and so next slide please so I think one one of one way to to try and you know to think about well what type of partnerships might actually help is to actually start with the issue and the linkages and you know fortunately there's been a lot of research done in sustainability science on the linkages mapping out the linkages between the goal across the entire or target across the entire set of SDGs and this is just one example from the Rene it summarizes the scientific literature on the the linkages so it's a generic it's not context-based but often these studies they you know what they tell us is there are many linkages across issue areas the they also cut across scales and and also the you know synergies tend to outweigh the trade-offs etc so I think you know what's the what's the implication for partnerships and we need to consider participation across issue areas and across scales and this has not been something that multi-stakeholder partnerships have been especially strong at as as Karen was mentioning earlier so next slide please so so this is where I had the concept of a broad-based partnership comes into place so it's a type of multi-stakeholder partnership that is specifically aimed at implementing a goal or target or synergy driver which is just a kind of a term for for an intervention or a solution in an integrated way so broad-based in the sense that well you know if you're bringing in actors from different issue areas or we saw with the the carbon tax example or a fuel tax example you know vulnerable groups or the case of renewable energy supports you know local communities you know typically there'll be many many actors who could you know perform a variety of roles like help you to identify and assess well how do the actual linkages play out so what are the interactions typically that's very context-based they can also suggest solutions so help you to to manage more effectively your your intervention so at the core of it is a notion of partnership there should be some shared commitments amongst the different actors to actually you know raise synergies and alleviate trade-offs in in some in a reasonably efficient and equitable manner and you know one yardstick for for judging the success of of the partnership is to look at well what are the actual outputs you know do these outputs support an integrated approach and really it should be a portfolio of transformative actions or you know these might be some of these might be unilateral actions but I think in many cases it's you'll find that it's actually there's some type of partnership needed to to actually effectively implement the you know the portfolio or specific parts of it okay so just a quick note on what the approach to implementation I have in mind here is it's you know based on a single entry points so you know this is this can be a goal target or our solution that aligns with siloed approaches that are quite common you know think of sectoral policy making companies pushing a solution etc and and you should consider the the the idea is to consider the interlinkages across all of the SDGs the main ones being I focus on first order interconnections but you know not like a nexus approach where you just consider a few goals maybe SDG to five and at seven but there you're ignoring the more social goals so you know that's just privileging the environmental dimension so you're not really the idea of looking across the entire agenda is to give a more balanced approach to to one that balances the three dimensions basically and that's the idea of of indivisibility next slide please so I I think I've used up my seven minutes so I'll I'll try to keep it to to 10 or 11 you can't you have some time extra please develop okay sure okay so so basically what the paper does is it outlines a six-step procedure for for basically building a broad-based partnership so it starts with just briefly to to describe it starts with the the issue focus so that's the entry point and then from there you map out the interlinkages across the entire SDGs and the next step then is to well identify in those interlinked areas who are the stakeholders that have responsibilities there and then in the fourth step then try to develop some type of of monitoring tool that you can assess what the state of progress is in those interlinked areas and on the basis of that then you can develop quite concrete recommendations on you know which stakeholders you need to bring in and what areas require for integration so going back to the example of sending girls to school you know in that case you would be you know the you would be thinking of looking at linkages with SDG1 on poverty, SDG9 on transport infrastructure, SDG16 on peace and security in the area, SDG2 on food and nutrition, SDG4 on quality if you see there's a problem in in one of those areas which you know if you use an indicator-based approach and you select a relevant indicator it should signal to you as the organizer of this type of partnership that there's an issue there and you know you need to be at least collaborating with the stakeholders in that particular issue area to try and find some way of of alleviating this particular problem so the idea behind this framework is that on the one hand you know for practitioners you can use it to try and you know build multi-stakeholder partnerships for integrated implementation and practice and on the other hand for researchers we can use it as a kind of an analytic concept to to assess existing partnerships and next slide please. Okay so the you know to speed up the process we can basically draw on the SDG data dividend and there's certain types of data that are quite useful one is there's a lot of mappings of interlinkages out there for for each of the goals and it was mentioned earlier the Stockholm Environment Institute SDG synergy tool there's also participatory tools that I think actually might be very useful for this it's a little bit harder when it comes to responsibilities across SDGs sometimes in the case of the Irish government if you know if you're interested in government departments it actually specifies the responsibilities across all of the SDGs for each of the departments so sometimes you have those type of profiles available other often you don't you know for the UN agencies a good place to look is the tier assessments they have good information there but sometimes you know if it's companies you have to try and think about what their core operations are so there's sometimes there's shortcuts and other times there's a bit of work to be done there in terms of developing a monitoring tool and you know there's a lot of work has been done on the SDG indicators there's data sets available okay they might not be up to date often we don't have recent data but and often it's not available at disaggregated level but you know there is much more indicators available now that we can use to at least get a first sense of how things are going in related areas and next slide please okay so I try I mean I wish I could give you transnational multi-stakeholder partnership examples but I don't have them but I did apply the approach at national level looked at the issue of coordination across line ministries for implementation the entry point here is SDG 14 this is the case of Ireland and provided you have good data on responsibilities a good sense of the interlinkages across between SDG 14 and the other SDGs and you know good availability of SDG data for SDG indicators you can develop quite concrete recommendations on you know who should be in this broad-based partnership so these are the these are the roles basically of this table you see their departments to be engaged in the broad-based partnership they have a first order linkage with the area of SDG 14 and then the entry points in the table are the issue areas that may require integration and these are the depth of challenges in those areas is graded using a traffic light system and you can see I've organized them according to essentially those issues that are you know specific to the have a specific marine focus and those issues that act as pressures that you know progress in those areas could affect achievement of SDG 14 and those areas where progress on SDG 14 could could affect those so I'm not using SDG terms here because I'm doing it at a kind of subgoal national level but the main point is that you know out of 16 government departments that existed in Ireland at that time the BPP consists of nine government departments and so that was significantly more than than existed okay next slide please just one can you wrap up yeah I was just going to do I saw your message there sorry for going on I'm lecturing too much these days I don't know when to stop okay so there are certain governance issues but I think we'll talk a bit more about this in the discussion so that's happy to hand it over to you there Karen I can come back to those points thank you very much David and thank you also for giving those concrete example from the governance level on the national level which is very useful so without further do the next present is Magdalena Magdalena Bexel she's an associate professor at Lund University and she is a partner in the transform project and she will reflect she has a very deep and wide knowledge on issues concerning legitimacy and accountability of partnerships in in general in governance so we are very curious to hear what you have to think about these things please Magdalena thank you Karin and and thank you for the initiative to organize and put together these different sides of the debate on partnerships in practice and and in academia too some of the previous presenters have touched a bit on the governance challenges so I think that was a very nice bridge from your presentation David now and I'm part of the transformative partnerships project where we also address questions of partnership legitimacy and accountability and such governance challenges now I was asked to provide overall reflections on these matters so please go to the next slide I only have one slide so this is where I what I will the kind of issues I will raise and I hope we can discuss them jointly with all the participants after and the audience of course so because multi-stakeholder partnerships exercise power in global governance in different ways we want to raise questions on legitimacy and authority and accountability too now as we heard in in a prior intervention there is a broad universe of partnerships of course for instance as mirrored in the more than six thousands of partnerships registered in the UNDESA platform so some are very big and do in fact exercise both agenda setting power and power over resources and implementation in with regard to the STDs many are very small partnerships and quite loosely institutionalized if at all so the level of power varies a lot to be sure now in research on partnerships legitimacy we usually think about different sources of potential legitimacy which I think provide a useful point of discussion so one source of partnership legitimacy is the input legitimacy derived from the procedures inclusive procedures participatory procedures and the like another is their output legitimacy so to what extent do they actually contribute and solve the problems for instance implement the STDs in our case or contribute to synergies between the STDs in actual practice and output we can also consider what we call substantive legitimacy so that the partnerships derive the legitimacy from the actual goal that they try to obtain a better health better education biodiversity and so on so the the main source of legitimacy for them would be in the very substantive goal they try to achieve rather than perhaps in the procedures they use or the actual output and then expert legitimacy is often referenced source of legitimacy for partnerships that by bringing together many different kinds of skills and expertise and resources in this partnering mode this would offer a source of legitimacy for why partnering as such is a governance tool to be strived for now at the same time all of these possible sources of legitimacy can also imply legitimacy challenges for partnerships and the more critical literature on partnerships is often derived derived around the input questions in global perspective at least this is a very big debate for instance with tensions between global north and global south in terms of who is represented in the global partnership universe who gets an extra voice through particularly the large partnerships in different issue realms I think it's important to remember in in discussing partnership legitimacy and the accountability challenges that arise in relation both to input and output legitimacy challenges that MSPs have very long accountability change so the vertical ones I think are in an ideal setting what we think of traditionally with regard to representation and accountability so voters from voters to governments from governments to international intergovernmental organizations from civil society organization their members to their boards to the international civil society networks and companies they have shareholders and boards and executives and so on so each of these accountability change add up in a partnership in the vertical sense making these chains very long and accountability very difficult horizontally partners in a partnership have some kind of responsibilities and accountability in relation to each other and the partnership goal as such and this is even more diffused because this is as we see in case studies very rarely institutionalized at all any accountability mechanisms but then the question is where should the main responsibility lie then and I think often both in research and in practice we find two high expectations on the partnership as such to exercise some form of accountability rather I think more emphasis should be on the members of partnerships often the secretariats of partnerships are quite small weak their resources are very limited except for the very large well-known ones but the large majority of MSPs they have quite weak institutionalized secretariats and procedures so I think in practice we have to put a lot of the spotlight on powerful members of partnerships when it comes to accountability issues and how they relate them to their vertical chains of accountability so governments of course as we see in many international organizations who have secretariats on running partnerships there are a few influential governments in many of these IO led partnerships that set the agenda and offer resources and so on so I think the accountability debate could be focused more on powerful participating members and how they exercise accountability now another overarching issue with regard to partnership legitimacy and the kind of debate on sources of legitimacy or challenges of legitimacy is in whose eyes partnerships should be considered legitimate then I think this raises many good questions on power and influence if we take the perspective of participating member governments for instance it's a very different view on legitimacy than if we take the perspective of those who are affected by partnership operations perhaps very locally in some cases and here research doesn't have the ultimate answer but we have to look into who are the key affected stakeholders by partnership operations to see in whose eyes do we think partnerships should be considered legitimate I think this is something that researchers and practitioners can align around in discussing from different perspectives in a very fruitful manner but also what kind of yardstick should we use at all when assessing partnership legitimacy should it be a very high ambitious idealized version of what we could expect there are very high expectations on partnerships with regard to synergies and implementation and participation are these at all good ideal yardstick to debate partnerships legitimacy or should should we somehow specify them and look more into participating members and their the way they exercise power in partnerships so these kinds of questions I think provide useful ground for reflection and yeah it's a summary overview I think of key tensions in the partnership universe thank you so much Magdali and I think your presentation as well as David and the others show that we really need to discuss this win-win narratives of partnership can they are we expecting too much can they accomplish both equity effectiveness and participation and this is of course a challenge so I will now we have here some I will now we will have a discussion now with Magdali and David on the theme and then there are some questions in the chat that concerns your presentations but also others so we will also move into back to the also previous presenters on some general question trying to sum up but first on and I will address the questions excellent question in the chat but first a question to David on actually the roadblocks to partnerships and I mean maybe we need to discuss roadblocks more or or barriers if I would say that three Lord three type of barriers we have first it's that site guys the era we have the this poly crisis the challenge of yeah multiple intersecting crisis war energy and security biodiversity climate I could go on and and and covid that for long meant the reversal partnerships that's one and one roadblock the other is political leadership who are hosting these partnerships they are as you said multi level but what is the responsibility of government and thirdly some have been pointed to the economic the finance investment so I mean to start with you David what do you see and both on national and global level what are the main barriers here are there in is it mainly political or economic or the era very polarized era we are in you need to turn off your microphone okay yeah sorry on mute yeah no great question so and great presentation Magdalena very very thought provoking so I think actually it's even deeper than that the tree you highlight it's I think we just live in societies that are built on silos and we don't there's no real capacity there to work across sectors or there's no there's no infrastructure really there I mean the powerful actors are doing it and they bring in the weaker actors you know to rubber stamp things often but we haven't we haven't mainstreamed you know this this way of of of working and addressing complex challenges it's new to us so I think the TPI report and unite to ignite you know the survey evidence there brings this out quite well just you know what the gaps are and yeah they're pretty extensive I think thank you David and now to you Magdalena and thanks for a very thoughtful presentation on the very complex accountability chains of partnerships and you indicated that we need more accountabilities more maybe stronger both oversight by international organization stronger partners that take the lead and on this issue we know that partnerships they can be led by business governments local authorities the UN you have any indication for or in your search though to to increase inclusiveness to increase equity is for example is it too is it for an instance would you and could you and play a more important role in in brokering this do you see this more in you and led partnerships or partnerships led by strong for example welfare states that would be or is it NGOs who will save us so to speak I think with regard to partnerships the UN has a key role because it has institutionalized channels to make sure that partnerships are not only very short-term affairs they have the secretariat capacity and then the capacity to bring together actors so I think governments through the UN but also the UN administrative bodies they will continue to need to to play a central role in yeah making partnerships not too short-term affairs I think it's it's better to have fewer partnerships in that sense that they can be more long-term and that each partnership has more resources to make something out of the actual goals that they set so so I would say fewer partnerships but but better institutionalized and more long-term would be better now we see a lot of new partnerships being created around summits and then as Montserrat and Cornelia showed then not many of them are actually operational after even one year or two years so you know much more about that and can expand on that but yeah so I think the UN is central thank you Magdalena and we will of course continue this research on UN partnerships to see if and I actually agree that to having a kind of stronger orchestration or meta-governance of partnerships from UN is not a maybe sufficient but necessary condition for more effective implementation so now I will actually go to some question in the chat thank you I want to thank the audience so Janet actually Vehmaki has a question sorry for not pronouncing your name right to directly to David on do you have any real examples of BBPs partnerships who have followed all these steps and currently are operational that would be wonderful wouldn't it that would be wonderful they know I don't it's it's it's just a proposal it's it's one way for for bringing in the the linkage dimension into the partnerships but I think I mean I mean I see other research now using the linkages as a type of benchmark to to to assess partnerships or collections of partnerships and I think that's that's a good approach and you know often it highlights it's you know the partnerships they're not completely siloed but you know they're they're missing important connections that are relevant in context thank you and on that note I also have and I think this is a very good question on our the research community we try to grapple measure linkages we use various tools and there is a question from Etala tampons that actually is directed and I want to call in all the panel participants to to answer here it says it seems that all participants have developed their own tools matrix to measure synergies is this a duplicational work and should there be one recognized tool to standardize measurements such as the tool lin presented and how does the sc sci address the overlap of measurements I think this is a very good question we have also measurements in the UN so I don't know if you want to take the lead on that lin yes absolutely yeah I think that's a very legitimate question and a good observation I mean I think I agree that since 2015 there's been this surge in development of different tools and methods to look at interlinkages for example and at least in the beginning they were very much of developing independently of each other so to some extent there has definitely been this duplication of efforts in some cases but I also see that this diversity of tools that exist now are serving very different purposes so in some cases they are highly participatory in other cases they're very sort of data driven based on more some desktop research there they can deal with issues at the global level only in some cases and at local level in other cases in some cases they're only focusing on more sort of scientific assessments so from for a more scientific audience in other cases it's more directed towards policymakers so I think there is also like this pluralism is also a strength I would say but having said that I think that this field has also now reached another level of maturity than it had five or so years ago so I think there is also now more of this these efforts of trying to bring you know people together from this community of of researchers and others that develop tools to try and learn from each other and share experiences so that we avoid this duplication of efforts. Thank you any more thoughts on this the kind of the I shouldn't say overbundance of the many tools is it something good or to let thousands blooms blossom or do we need a more steering? Karin maybe I will add something very briefly because I think Lin's answer was already great but indeed when we started looking into this research of what we're calling supply and demand right so supply in the of the side of partnerships supplying solutions for inter is the gender linkages and demand of like oh we need these inter linkages the demand of inter linkages for transformation so when we started there we started by trying to identify the scientific literature that is putting out there these demands right and there are various frameworks that we find out there but indeed as Lin was saying before they're not focusing exactly on the same but this is something that we're currently working on and will be hopefully published in the framework of this project so and there we are trying to also just show a little bit more of an overview of what is the demand actually what is the scientific literature saying should be covered. Thank you Montserrat and we have a question I will very thoughtful reflection and question from Malcolm John I will not read it up but it basically concerns this unequal partners or power disparities of partners he exemplifies from student when a student organization partners with a corporate organization the kind of not equal level playing fields that occur and yes you can read it and my take on this is that this is exactly the dilemma we talked about I mean in a way partnerships if they are bottom up organic they grow from the bottom where partners that's something positive a kind of as a decentralized however that also gives less to tap into what Magdalena talked about possibility to steer and monitor and track and secure inclusion so this is in a way so I think part of my answer to that question is in order to to have more equal partnerships we need a combination of kind of orchestration convening from the UN and other to have metrics to to ensure equal participation but we cannot take away the self-organized because that's the power of partnership so there is not a single not an easy questions on this if anyone else have any reflection on this question please join yes I saw Magdalena first and then David okay yes so briefly I think we will never have a situation where all partners are equal in terms of power and resources and so on they bring complementary skills and so on but precisely because it will never happen that that all will be equal in a partnership it's extremely important to be clear about the purpose of partnering and the contributions that each partner is expected to make at the outset and I think that many partnerships suffer from kind of vague and lofty goals so so that would be my response thank you Magdalena David you had a reflection on this yeah just to add to that I mean I agree I think clarifying rules and responsibilities is key some of the problems arise because of a vagueness around those the yeah I think this is absolutely essential challenge to you know to realizing the transformative potential of multi-stakeholder partnerships so it definitely deserves careful attention and particularly in the area of you know achieving integrated approaches because you know often it's the experiential knowledge of you know the more local organizations or groups who you know they actually have an experience of how these interactions play out and they know what type of solutions might work or might not work in their context so they're absolutely I think essential to realizing this approach I was at the academy in management last august and I heard speaking Barbara Gray I think who's a specialist on you know inequalities in participation and her presentation was very interesting she outlined basically we have a lot of background work to do before we run the partnership to ensure that we get a quality of participation or at least close to it so that would be what I would add to the conversation thank you David and we now we have five minutes left but I will actually end with a future question that I wanted to post the panelists but that are also posed by John Armstrong so I will invite each panelist with a final reflection namely we know that the narrative around stg's is increasingly pessimistic in the light of the midterm view where it was very low stg fulfillment and the question here has this general also to the dire state of the world has this transplanted to partnerships has this changed interest and commitment on msp's and so basically I do you think now as we are heading toward the summit for the future the summer and it will be the also discuss the text that the UN EC now in Geneva do you think yeah is the glass half full or half empty so I think we end with this very general question maybe half a minute each do you want to start Lynn yes sure thank you Colin that's yeah I guess my answer would be let's focus perhaps on on specifically on the msp I'll leave that for the other speakers but I think in general on sort of the issue of interlinkages I think this whole sort of increased urgency that comes with a lack of progress on the stg's that's from my perspective at least it's just making the case even more for taking a systemic perspective on synergies and trade off so that we can really focus the efforts and and the capacity that we have in a smarter way and prioritize in a smarter way if prioritization is necessary which it most likely is so that would be my message thanks thank you Cornelia you have any reflection and after that Montserrat given your research pre-summit on these partnerships yes thank you I think I will add a little note from my research I'm developing for my phd which is focusing mainly on goals and targets and the role of those and there what I've seen so far is that over time there seems to be a consistent trend in what Magdalena mentioned on setting these kind of tall ambitious but very vague type of commitments and goals and I think that's something we will continue seeing even though the narrative globally is changing from commitment to action there seems to be a consistency in those commitments and I think what's important now is to kind of figure out what type of effects or steering effects can come from those aspirational goals and yeah can we continue setting those um so that will be my my key takeaway I guess for the future yeah thank you Montserrat yes thank you um for the last reflection prompt um so I guess I don't have I don't know if any of us has like uh accurate empirical data on whether this pessimism pessimism has let's say transplanted um we did see we did observe in several summits that on a high political level the agenda tends to gravitate towards geopolitical concerns and sustainable development is always rather pushed to the bottom but I guess similar to Lynn's opinion solutions I think could be much easier and much more easier than than we're used to see and more actionable if we were able to effectively identify these so-called um high leverage points and I think that is let's say what at least for me keeps the light of hope on that um by taking taking this more systemic approach we're able to actually and effectively accelerate progress in the in the years left of the 2030 agenda thanks now David and then Magdalena one minute half a minute each and then I will wrap it up what do you think have follow up have empty um well I think early signals are a little discouraging but I don't think we should lose hope and um I think we haven't really explored the transformative potential of the agenda and the SDGs and I think you know conversations like these and bringing together different networks and really thinking hard about you know how we can enable these approaches and account for linkages I think is a good a good path forward and something we should try to achieve in the next seven years thank you Magdalena you have the last word yes I my guess is that working towards the 2030 deadline is the is more important to partnership energy than the reviews as such so so I think the way the the countdown towards 2030 is hopefully something that keep partnerships going at least until then thank you and on this note I want to round up this I think extremely um I learned a lot from this panel and I want to own partnerships and MSP and SDGs and how we can scale them up integrate have a more systemic approach to achieve legitimacy and effectiveness and I want to thank all the presenters and and the audience for very good questions and a particularly thanks to SCI for setting up this panel and also for Freya University who organized this big thanks to to Maria Kohle and Elan Talwell who really the techniques are very important to this and we have also I should note recorded this side event so it's there if if you are curious to if you missed some presentations and of course both at SCI at Stockholm University Lund University Institute of Future Studies at Freya University we will continue with this research so please follow us on our and I think it's in the invitation on our webpage linked in and Facebook and we will definitely be back to showcase further research findings as we slowly approach 2030 and yeah on that note big thanks to all and hope to see you very soon again