From Transactional to Transformational: Rethinking Partnerships in Systems Change
Partnerships are at the heart of almost every systems change initiative. No single organisation, sector, or leader can shift a system alone or in isolation. Yet while the language of partnership is pervasive, the quality and depth of those partnerships vary dramatically. Too often, they remain transactional, structured around funding agreements, project deliverables, or short-term outputs.
For systemic transformation, this is just not enough. What is required are partnerships that move beyond transactions to become vehicles of co-creation, learning, and trust-building. Partnerships that do not merely support systems change, but are themselves a form of the systemic impact we want to see in the world.
The Ladder of Partnerships
Partnerships can be understood as existing on a ladder of depth:
- Coordination: Aligning activities with minimal integration.
- Cooperation: Sharing resources and information in pursuit of parallel goals.
- Collaboration: Joint planning and delivery of initiatives.
- Co-creation/Transformation: Shared ownership of vision, risk, and experimentation to generate outcomes no single actor could achieve alone.
This framing echoes guidance from multilateral institutions such as the United Nations and the World Bank, which have long emphasised that effective partnerships evolve from coordination toward deeper forms of collaboration and shared accountability. Most initiatives, however, stall on the lower rungs of the ladder, where relationships remain functional but limited. Systems change requires movement up the ladder, to the point where partnerships themselves reshape what is possible.
A powerful illustration of how transformational partnerships, and indeed, partnerships themselves as outcomes, can reshape systems can be drawn from Reos Partners’ work with the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP). GEAPP is an alliance composed of multiple actors (governments, funders, private sector partners, and civil society organisations) working tirelessly together to address energy poverty, inequality, and climate change in emerging economies. GEAPP is itself a network of partnerships; therefore, its ability to drive systemic impact relies on the quality of those interlocking relationships.
The Partnerships Approach developed with GEAPP in 2023-2024 demonstrates that partnerships can be both the means and an outcome of systems change. GEAPP does more than deliver clean energy projects; it creates a resilient ecosystem capable of driving systemic transformation, fostering trust, and enabling cross-sector experimentation that would not have been possible through isolated interventions.
Why Transformational Partnerships Matter
Transformational partnerships matter because they create the conditions in which complexity can be navigated and new futures imagined. They allow actors to:
- Hold differences and negotiate across these diverse perspectives.
- Pool capabilities and resources to tackle root causes rather than addressing symptoms.
- Discover innovative possibilities that no organisation could generate in isolation.
As Otto Scharmer (MIT) argues in his work on Theory U, the most profound shifts happen when stakeholders move beyond downloading old patterns and begin to co-create from a shared sense of emerging future possibilities. Transformational partnerships make this kind of generative co-creation possible.
In this way, the partnership is not simply an input to systemic work; it becomes an outcome. A durable coalition, a rebalanced relationship of power, or a new bond of trust between unlikely allies is, in itself, a form of progress. It lays the groundwork for change that endures beyond any single intervention.
The Invisible Outcomes of Partnership
Indeed, the most critical outcomes of partnerships are often intangible: a shift in narrative, a capacity for joint problem-solving, or the emergence of trust across historical divides. These “invisible” results are often easy to overlook but can be decisive in determining whether systemic change becomes possible.
Margaret Wheatley, in her book Turning to One Another, reminds us that, “Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else.” Systems change requires us to take this to heart, to value and nurture the relational fabric as much as the visible outcomes.
More than anything, this requires a mindset shift, particularly for funders and institutional leaders. Rather than viewing partnerships solely as mechanisms for delivering projects, they must be recognised and valued as core results of systemic work.
What It Takes to Move Beyond Transactions
Creating transformational partnerships demands intention and discipline. A few practices stand out:
- Start with shared purpose, not outputs: Purpose builds resilience when challenges arise, as they will.
- Invest in trust as solid infrastructure: Relationships are not a soft add-on; they are the foundation of systemic work.
- Acknowledge power imbalances: Partnerships unravel when issues of power remain unspoken.
- Embrace emergence: Transformational partnerships evolve, sometimes in unexpected directions. The ability to adapt is as important as the initial design.
Rethinking How We Evaluate Partnerships
If we are to genuinely pursue systems change, we must also rethink how we evaluate success. What if initiatives were assessed not only by the policies passed or services delivered, but also by the quality of the partnerships they cultivated? What if we treated the creation of resilient, trust-based, cross-sector relationships as an outcome equal in weight to programmatic achievements?
In systems change, partnerships are not peripheral; they are the work itself. Moving beyond transactions toward transformational partnerships requires a shift in practice and in mindset: to value the invisible outcomes, to embrace shared ownership, and to see partnerships not just as a means to an end, but as a legitimate form of impact in their own right. The systems we are trying to change will only move as far as the quality of the partnerships we build to change them.
