Primer series
The SDG 17 primer series documents cross-sector partnerships with health systems, community organizations, federal agencies, academic institutions, and international collaborators.
Follow new publications via the RSS feed.
Primers
Draft for author review
Aligned but Unequal: Governing Partnerships Across the Public-Private Divide
Adil Eastwood · 2026
Public-private partnerships are widely promoted as a way to combine the strengths of business, government, and civil society on problems none can solve alone. The promise is real. But these partnerships join organizations with fundamentally different purposes: a business exists to create value for its owners, a public agency to serve a mandate, a civil-society organization to advance a mission. They can align on a s…
Read primer →Draft for author review
Closer to the Ground: Country Ownership and the Remaking of Global Partnership
V. Viyas Thilagarajan, MS · 2026
Global partnership for health and development is being rebuilt in real time. The financing landscape has shifted sharply, the long-standing architecture of international cooperation is under strain, and a new vocabulary, country ownership, regional alignment, local capacity, is emerging to describe what comes next. This primer is about that reconstruction and the principle increasingly at its center: that partners…
Read primer →Draft for author review
Funding That Holds: Blended Financing and the Problem of the Funding Cliff
Brandy Hampton, MBA · 2026
A great deal of public-interest work dies not from failure but from the calendar. A program is funded by a grant, demonstrates results, and then ends when the grant cycle closes, because nothing was in place to carry it forward. This is the funding cliff, and it is one of the most predictable and wasteful patterns in the social sector. This primer is about how partnership in financing, the braiding together of d…
Read primer →Draft for author review
Many Hands, One Map: Civic Coalitions and the Discipline of Shared Measurement
Jonathan Moore · 2026
A neighborhood facing a complex challenge, say, the overlapping pressures of housing, health, and economic opportunity, often has many organizations already working on pieces of it. Nonprofits, clinics, faith institutions, businesses, agencies, and residents are all engaged. Yet the problem persists, not because no one is trying but because everyone is trying separately, each with its own goals, its own definition of…
Read primer →Draft for author review
Partners, Not Subjects: When Institutions and Communities Work as Equals
Katrina Polk, PhD · 2026
When a hospital, a university, or a government agency announces a partnership with a community, the word implies equals. Often the reality is not. The institution holds the funding, the credentials, the data, and the decision-making power; the community is consulted, studied, or served, but rarely in genuine control of the work meant to benefit it. This primer is about the difference between partnerships in name and…
Read primer →Draft
The Work Between Organizations: Coordination as Its Own Infrastructure
Adler Archer, JD · 2026
The hardest problems in public life, health inequity, housing, the durability of the systems people depend on, share a frustrating feature: no single organization can solve them. They sit in the spaces between sectors, where a hospital, a city agency, a community group, and a funder each hold one piece and none holds the whole. This is why partnership is not a nice addition to the work but the work itself, and why th…
Read primer →