The growing burden of mental disorders in sub-Saharan Africa is compounded by limited access to care, under-resourced systems and fragmented research and mentorship efforts. Existing research is often nationally isolated, dependent on unstable external funding and relies on models transposed from high-income countries without sufficient local adaptation. This article proposes a model for establishing regional “South–South” research networks, drawing on lessons from the East African Mental Health Collaborative (EAMHC), a partnership among institutions in Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda, and facilitated by Duke University. Formed in 2024, the EAMHC brings together early- to mid-career researchers and senior mentors to promote cross-country collaboration, mentorship and co-production of research. Using a hybrid structure of annual in-person meetings and monthly virtual engagements, the collaborative network emphasizes joint research output, capacity strengthening and sustainability through shared leadership and cross-learning. Early successes include the submission of three manuscripts and the procurement of two grants. The structure stresses equitable leadership, with East African investigators rotating as site leads to promote institutional ownership and protected research time. This proposed model demonstrates that regional networks can effectively pool limited expertise to develop contextually relevant, evidence-based solutions. By prioritizing bidirectional and peer-led mentorship and harmonized research frameworks, the EAMHC provides a scalable blueprint for strengthening mental health systems and fostering researcher independence in resource-limited settings.

This research identifies conditions of intra- and cross-sector partnerships with nonprofit organizations that lead to social innovation development. Primary survey data were collected from a nationally focused sample of executive directors in Canada (n = 720) on two valid and reliable multifactor measures, including partnership dynamics for social innovation and human services social innovation. Results of a multivariate regression analysis found that the structure of engagement and clarity of outcomes in partnerships were found to significantly predict all three types of social innovation (including product-based, process-based, and socially transformative social innovations), while alignment of partnership outcomes was not predictive of any social innovation outcome. Results identify aspects of partnerships that are most supportive of nonprofit social innovation development and provide a measurement tool for partner actors to assess partnership dynamics that lead to the development and undertaking of socially innovative initiatives.

Many environmental nonprofit organizations (ENPOs) seek to create sustainability value by promoting environmental principles and influencing policymakers to support pro-environmental legislation. One strategy used by ENPOs to enhance the value creation process is the development of partnerships with businesses. Semi-structured interviews with leaders of six national ENPOs in the United States were conducted to examine the sources and types of value created by collaborations with renewable energy businesses, and the partnership processes and outcomes that are most desirable. The goal was to understand how and why ENPOs seek partnerships, what the potential benefits are, and whether or not ENPO leadership orientation, as characterized by their perceptions of the political opportunity structure, political ideology, and environmental philosophy, led to different views of partnerships for sustainability value creation. The finding that differences in the partnership perspectives of the ENPO leadership did not directly link to differences in the leadership orientations suggests that none of the orientations precluded partnering in general and may even have been enablers in some cases.

This paper explores the legitimacy of third sector organizations in the policy process in the United Kingdom. It draws on empirical research to examine how legitimacy is defined, both by third sector organizations and by those they target within government. The paper argues that while many third sector organizations give high priority to political forms of legitimacy—in the sense of participatory structures and accountability to members and beneficiaries—government is generally more likely to give priority to technical forms of legitimacy, e.g., the quality of research and the ability to implement policy. Nonetheless, political legitimacy is still important, first because this is the form of legitimacy that third sector organizations claim for themselves and second because, as government gives way to governance with an increase in partnerships and collaboration, the dilemmas faced by third sector organizations in achieving political legitimacy are being faced on a broader canvas.

This study examines the distinction between power imbalance and mutual dependence to better understand how NGOs manage resource dependencies in their relationships with civil society partners. The NGO leaders we interviewed emphasized mutual dependence in the relationships they developed with other NGOs regarding access to financial and information resources. In contrast, discourse about their relationships with IGOs focused on the acquisition of legitimacy and access, and was dominated by power imbalance. NGOs were largely accepting of both forms of dependence in pursuit of the community’s shared goals and for the greater good of constituents. Our finding that NGOs refrain from terminating suboptimal relationships also reflects the extent to which mutual dependence governs NGOs partnering strategies.

The extant literature on the relations between government and NGOs is limited in two respects—dominant focus on relations between central government and NGOs and a limited discussion of typologies of relations in countries in Africa. This study seeks to make a modest contribution to addressing these limitations by studying the relations between local government and NGOs in Ghana. This paper proposes a four-dimensional framework for analysing the relations between local government and NGOs in Ghana. It reports that the relations are varied, complex and multi-dimensional and characterised by superficial and suspicious cordiality; tokenistic and cosmetic collaboration; friendly-foe relation; and convenient and cautious partnerships.

Social enterprises face complex institutional logics due to their focus on both economic and social goals, resulting in institutional tensions. Interorganizational collaboration is a strategy to cope with environmental turbulence and complexity. Guided by institutional theory and the literature on interorganizational collaboration, this study examines the role of partnership building in managing institutional tensions and hybrid organizational forms undertaken by social enterprise organizations. With interview data collected from 15 social enterprises in a southeastern state in the USA, this study demonstrates that the majority of the sampled organizations reported experiencing organizing and learning tensions while a couple reported performing and belonging tensions. Organizations leveraged specific cross-sector partnerships to obtain legitimacy and sustain their businesses. A typology of partnerships (community engagement, resource acquisition, and dual-value) is proposed based on organizational forms and activities undertaken by various SEs to manage these tensions.

Interest in collaboration between government and private, grantmaking foundations has grown considerably in recent years both in the USA and abroad. In the USA, one outcome of the increased interest has been the emergence of liaison offices in federal agencies tasked with facilitating partnerships between government and grantmaking foundations and others, such as corporate philanthropic programs. As the government/foundation relationship is still under-conceptualized, we propose a framework that extends general government/nonprofit relationship typologies to grantmaking foundations and present empirical evidence on the foundation roles that government liaison officers prioritize in developing partnerships with their foundation counterparts. Empirically, the article is based on semi-structured interviews with these officers in U.S. federal cabinet departments and independent agencies. Having foundation funding substitute for government outlays factors heavily for government liaison staff. At the same time, the role of foundations in seeding government innovation plays a relatively modest role, despite the prominence of the foundation innovation role in the literature. Rather than having government scale foundation-identified innovations, government liaison officers emphasize foundations funding support services that provide access to or enhance government programs and foundations providing expertise to help co-design better government programs.

Inspired by “extra-market” initiatives to ensure media diversity in social-democratic Northern Europe, the Media Development and Diversity Agency (MDDA) is a path-breaking attempt by a developing country to support the media needs of marginalized communities too poor to be of interest to advertising-driven commercial media. This paper examines the policy process towards the establishment of the MDDA as a partnership between the state, capital, and civil society within the constraints of South Africa’s re-entry into a global economy that privileges “free market” solutions to developmental problems. Under these conditions, do partnerships between the state, the private sector, and civil society facilitate or hinder the achievement of social objectives aimed primarily at uplifting the poor and marginalized?.

In this paper, the authors analyze different forms of interface between the government and third sector organizations in Québec. In order to do so, they studied relationships in eight different fields of activity: homeless youth services, housing for intellectually deficient people, support organizations for natural caregivers, community leisure centers, community housing for the elderly, daycare centers, social economy organizations for domestic assistance, and services specializing in employment for handicapped people. Following a review of international literature on the relationship between the government and the third sector, the paper analyzes these relationships on the basis of the typology developed by Jennifer M. Coston, which is adapted to the Québécois context. In the eight activity sectors studied, the authors found the presence of four different types of interface between the government and the third sector: “subcontracting,” “coexistence,” “supplementarity,” and “co-construction” relationships.

In the United Kingdom, the “New Labour” administration that came to power in 1997 has promoted two models of partnership between the state and the voluntary sector. The civic engagement model is based on the renewed interest among governments in the potential of voluntary organizations to contribute to the civic engagement of citizens. In the service delivery model, voluntary organizations are recruited to the task of delivering core social services. Drawing on data from disability-related voluntary organizations in Northern Ireland, this paper illustrates the impact of the service delivery partnership model on the development of voluntary action in the welfare field, and the relative paucity of resources allocated to participatory voluntary action and civic engagement. The consequent impact on the development of partnerships between the state and the voluntary sector is discussed.

Service restructuring trends since the 1980s have resulted in the downsizing or closure of many services in rural and small town Canada. In response, voluntary groups have been filling some of the emerging service gaps. Services, however, often are directed at complex problems that demand information, support, or assistance from a range of sources and institutions. For voluntary groups, this underscores a need to partner with other groups, organizations, or service providers. At the same time, voluntary organizations are increasingly encouraged to develop partnerships with public or private partners in order to qualify for government funding. This study tracks 29 voluntary organizations in four rural and small town places across Canada to explore the development and maintenance of partnerships (both local and non-local), as well as the types of networks, resources, and expertise for which partnerships were used. The findings indicate that while voluntary organizations feel that local partnerships are more important, partnerships with groups outside of these places are equally developed. Partnerships were used to expand networks, obtain expertise, and access a range of resources to assist in daily operations and delivery of services. The increase in partnerships with groups outside of these communities, particularly with non-local service providers, will have important implications for voluntary organizations and policy makers.

This paper traces the development of the voluntary and community sector in Northern Ireland from the early 1970s onwards. Particular attention is given to the expansion of the voluntary and community sector in the 1970s, community action in conflict with government in the 1980s, and new funding—from the European Union and other international sources—for development work since the mid-1990s. More recent trends discussed include the rapprochement of the voluntary and community sector with government, which has seen a growth in formal partnerships and networking, as well as the impact of the 1998 Belfast Agreement.

International organisations (IOs) hold important governance functions and power. Yet, they are several steps detached from the constituencies that have entrusted them with functions and resources to carry them out, even as accountability expectations remain significant for their legitimacy. This article presents a broadly generalisable theoretical framework for understanding the variable accountability of IOs, seeking to advance the understanding of international accountability in three new ways. First, it elaborates on the concept of the scope of IO accountability, which can vary across organisations, over time, and across contexts. The idea of a scope of accountability moves beyond the dichotomy of accountable versus non-accountable power holders and advances an understanding of accountability as a multi-layered phenomenon, whereby both the expectations and practices of accountability can evolve over time and with respect to different audiences. Second, the article identifies three political factors – namely the formal and informal excercise of power, institutional structure, and public salience – that can shape, in important ways, the variable scope of IO accountability. Finally, it critically explores the tensions and contradictions between these political dynamics, and the implications for access to and the efficacy of accountability systems.