The philosopher Gabrielle Halpern is a guest contributor this week in The UN Brief. An opportunity for her to speak about the SDGs, drawing attention to SDG 17, Partnerships.
“In 2015, United Nations Member States defined seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Among the latter, we find that of the eradication of poverty, that of access to health or even that of the use of renewable energies. There is one that particularly attracts attention; the seventeenth and final objective, namely “partnerships for the achievement of the objectives”. This last objective seems to be the keystone of the United Nations 2030 Agenda, perhaps the sine qua non condition for the achievement of all the other objectives, since it indicates the path to follow. It is about fighting against withdrawal into oneself, between oneself and everyone for themselves, individualism and disengagement.
Changing the world - or at least repairing it - does not rest on the shoulders of a few and it is precisely because this responsibility falls on everyone that we must join together to achieve it.
While we hear grandiloquent speeches all day long for fashionable professions like that of data scientists, it could well be that the truly great profession, THE profession which will become strategic in the years to come, is that of… director partnerships!
The capacity of a company, an association, a public administration, a school, a retirement home, a restaurant, a theater, a hospital, a country or yet another local authority to see itself as an ecosystem responsible for the creation and cultivation of a real territorial, cultural, social, professional, educational, sectoral, intergenerational network will become crucial in the years to come. Tomorrow, what will make a company strong will be its ability to carry with it its entire value chain: suppliers, subcontractors, customers, territories, public partners, investors, schools and even competitors!
As long as each actor remains locked in their box, there will be no repair of the world. As long as each actor in the City does not assume their partnership responsibility, there will be no social contract. Tomorrow, we will evaluate a company, an association, a school, a hotel, a factory or even a restaurant in relation to its capacity to play a role as a point of reference for its territory, to create bridges between worlds, to cultivate networks and ecosystems; in other words, in relation to its capacity to “hybridize” and “hybridize”.”