Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Many transnational multi-stakeholder initiatives (also known as partnerships) have emerged in global sustainability politics. Most research has so far been conducted in the form of single-or small-n case studies. Although many of these studies address the pressing questions of effectiveness (or influence), the accumulated case studies do not provide convincing knowledge on the role and relevance of partnerships in local and global politics. They suffer from a lack of consensus on a definition and therefore they are difficult to compare. Hence, we argue for a large-n evaluation of the influence of partnerships in global sustainability politics, to assess whether and how partnerships matter. To facilitate such analysis, we are developing a Global Sustainability Partnership Database (GSPD). In the GSPD data is collected on two types of variables: measures of the influence of transnational public policy partnerships, and possible explanatory factors. This paper presents an appraisal framework for the relevance and influence of partnerships, in particular by means of the GSPD that we are developing. To this end, we first review the available literature (section 2) and outline then our general approach and especially our database project (section 3). Its key elements we describe in the two subsequent sections: our measurement concept for the influence of partnerships (section 4), and a set of hypotheses that we will test in a larger research effort based on this database (section 5).