The Stakeholder Engagement Manual Volume 2 - AccountAbility

12 Offi ce of Consumer Affairs “Voluntary Codes: A Guide for their Development and Use”, Canada, 1998.
STAGE 4
Multi-stakeholder Alliances, Partnerships,Voluntary Initiatives, Joint Projects
Companies and stakeholders from public, private and voluntary sectors taking action together
through collaborative ventures or mutually agreed commitments. This may be a partnership
between a single company and a stakeholder organisation, or a multi-way alliance including
several participants.
Voluntary initiatives involving both industry and governments have increased since the early
1990s in an effort to improve sustainability performance. They often include both a variety of
commitments by individual member companies to achieve environmental or social objectives
that go beyond existing regulations, and which can also take the form of codes of conduct
adopted at the national or international level by industrial sector associations, or agreements
on performance targets between a government and a company, a group of companies or an
industry sector. These agreements can then be complimented with specifi c agreements to
take mutually supportive or joint actions towards broader goals.
Key things to consider
Partnership initiatives designs need to take account of the costs and benefi ts for each
of the participants – they may not share a common set of goals or values but they can work
together to achieve specifi c shared objectives.
Many partnership initiatives start in an informal manner and are initiated or catalysed
by a strong individual champion within one of the organisations, who might be acting as
a partnership broker to bring organisations together. In the longer term, in order to become
durable and embedded within the organisations involved, partnerships need to develop a
more formal structure and governance process.
A partnership often grows to include more partners over time, as needed to achieve its
objectives and meet the needs of stakeholders within a changing environment.
As partnerships become more focused and technical, for example voluntary initiatives to
develop specifi c codes, they tend to become more formalised in both process and
outcome. In the late 1990s a study by the Canadian Government 12 identifi ed the
following eight steps for developing effective voluntary codes: 1. Gathering information;
2. Preliminary discussions with major stakeholders; 3. Create a working group;
4. Preliminary draft of the code; 5. Consultations on Preliminary draft; 6. Publication and
dissemination of the Code; 7. Implementation; 8. Review.
THE PRACTITIONER'S HANDBOOK ON STAKEHOLDER ENGAGEMENT | 107