Scaling up collaboration for social impact: the governance and design of corporate-nonprofit partnerships

Corporate-nonprofit partnerships can play a crucial role in realizing the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals by creatively recombining resources and capabilities across sectors to address large-scale social issues of mutual concern. However, uniting around common goals and creatively reimagining new solutions when partner organizations are so different is easier said than done. The challenge of corporate-nonprofit partnerships is one of governance: how do we govern these relationships so that they can reach their potential without being undermined by the very differences that make them so promising in the first place? This chapter describes the various forms of corporate-nonprofit partnerships that exist, integrates literature from across research in Management to surface critical insights about this phenomenon, and identifies new research opportunities in this area. As it examines relevant work spanning different research domains, this chapter studies the phenomenon according to multiple levels of analysis: it covers macro-level, inter-organizational, and individual determinants of corporate-nonprofit partnership success. It raises the need to combine local and global action using polycentric design, create partnership strategies that are resilient to external change, and consider how partnerships generate and distribute public versus private value across stakeholder groups. The chapter's multilevel, interdisciplinary approach offers an ambitious research agenda that stands to yield rich theoretical insights with strong practical applications of immediate and lasting value to both business and society.