Over the past two decades, research as well as practice have praised the promise of cross-sector partnerships as the new transnational governance mechanism for reaching international development goals. Although there is general consensus that partnerships have the potential to contribute to development in the Global South, there is, however, increasing suspicion that in practice, they often do not. On the basis of an empirical analysis of a North-South Business-NGO partnership for poverty alleviation in Ghana, we show that existing assessment frameworks in the management literature are useful but insufficient for assessing partnerships in a development context. Through an integration of theoretical and empirical insights, we propose a novel framework, Partnerships for Development, which puts forward organizational preconditions for cross-sector partnerships to produce societal impact in the Global South, giving way to an assessment system for cross-sector partnerships in terms of their impact potential.

在过去的二十年中，研究和实践都赞扬了跨部门伙伴关系作为实现国际发展目标的新的跨国治理机制的希望。尽管人们普遍认为伙伴关系有潜力为全球南方的发展做出贡献，但是越来越多的人怀疑，实际上，伙伴关系通常没有。在对加纳的北南企业与非政府组织减贫伙伴关系进行实证分析的基础上，我们表明，管理文献中现有的评估框架是有用的，但不足以在发展背景下评估伙伴关系。通过理论和实证见解的整合，我们提出了一个新颖的框架，即发展伙伴关系提出了跨部门伙伴关系在全球南方产生社会影响的组织先决条件，而就跨部门伙伴关系的影响潜力而言，它却被一个评估体系所取代。