Henry Mintzberg – PPPPs for Climate Change

Much has been written about PPPs: public private partnerships. But for vital issues such as climate change, a third partner has been missing: the plural sector.

Otherwise known as “civil society”, and other labels, this is the sector of NGOs, foundations, cooperatives, many of the world’s renowned universities, and more, including social initiatives and social movements—much of all this community-based. In other words, included here are all the associations that are neither public nor private, that is, owned not by the state or by private investors, but by members (as in cooperatives), or else, like trusts, by no-one.

This sector is huge–think of all such activities you have associated with in the past week. Yet it has been obscured by the centuries-old divide between left and right, government controls and market forces. Now we are discovering, with a vengeance, that no healthy society, like no stable stool, can balance itself on two legs. A third is required–the plural sector—alongside those called private and public.

By Henry Mintzberg. Dec 2018
Co-authored with Dror Etzion and Saku Mantere; adapted from “Wordly Strategy for the Global Climate” in the Stanford Social Innovation Review (Fall 2018).

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