Ingredients for successful partnerships

For the development of new cross-sector partnerships it is required to know what the essence of successful partnership projects is. Which factors influence success or failure of partnerships is highly related to the specific context where partnerships operate. The literature on critical success factors (henceforth CSF) for partnerships is enormous, this is for understandable reasons since scholars see CSF’s as a first step towards the development of workable and efficient partnership.1 Researchers and practitioners aim to understand those elements that are necessary to achieve the joint mission of the partners or in other words: “those few key areas of activity in which favourable results are absolutely necessary to reach goals”2. CSFs can be defined as: “the limited number of areas, the result of which, if they are satisfactory, will ensure successful performance for the partnerships. They are the few key areas where ‘things must go right’ for the partnership to flourish” (ibid: 3).