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Beware zombie partnerships! GDI on winding down partnerships in SSIR

Building on our study “More than the Sum of Its Parts: Making multi-stakeholder initiatives work,” GDI outlines when and how to wind down a partnership – especially in a sector with finite resources.

It’s essential to think critically about when and how an MSI should wind down—especially given that the global development sector lacks resources but is abundant in fragmented entities. These dynamics perpetuate what one interviewee described as “zombie partnerships.” He commented, “The conflation of an MSI’s strategy failure and execution failure exacerbates the problem, because it can come across as a failure of organizations to partner, compared with the failure of the partnership to realize impact. And people don’t like that, so they continue to partner for the sake of partnering.