ABSTRACT

The concept of a 'partnership broker' was coined by Ros Tennyson and Luke Wilde in 2000, eight years after the Rio Earth Summit saw governments, businesses and Non-Governmental Organisation meeting together at a strategic global level to address the issue of sustainable development. It is clear that whilst partnering has become the default mechanism for delivering aid and development programmes and is now a 'Sustainable Development Goal' in its own right, there is still a long way to go in optimising partnership potential. Every partnership is unique and the expectations and requirements from those acting as partnership brokers, as well as the possibilities and opportunities for partnership brokering, vary enormously. There are two types of partnership brokers are Internal partnerships brokers and External partnership brokers. The separation of 'internal' from 'external' may help to demystify some elements of the partnership brokering role but there are other ways of viewing the different types of partnership brokering approaches that exist.