Investigating the robustness and relevance of an evidence-based sense-making construct to bridge the research-practice gap in cross-sector partnerships

Despite their growing prevalence, there is a lack of evidence-based understanding about the dominant features of these engagements, making it challenging to develop CSP engagement models that are effective across various development problems and settings. CSPs are inherently cross-disciplinary endeavors that require collaboration models that enable interdisciplinary problem orientation and solution casting. To facilitate sense-making in partnership efforts, a CSP engagement model must integrate perspectives on partnership from major disciplines and practitioner experiences. Partnership capacity theory (PCT) is an interdisciplinary, actionable model of collaborative CSP dynamics that integrates perspectives on CSP formation and strategic management from diverse views on inter-organizational relations in management and social science scholarship. PCT posits three critical drivers for CSP relationships: purpose (reasons organizations partner), context (environmental and organizational traits that mediate CSP and partner dynamics), and relationship enablers (inter-organizational engagement strategies that drive inter-partner relations). PCT was developed from a manual review of 350 peer-reviewed articles focused on best practices in business-involved partnerships for market-based international and socioeconomic development. A significantly expanded literature review employing automated content analysis (ACA) was conducted to examine the robustness of PCT in relation to the broader literature on CSPs. This review analyzed a corpus of over 2000 peer-reviewed and gray literature publications on partnerships. Additionally, 41 CSP practitioner interviews were thematically analyzed to evaluate the relevance of PCT as a generalized sense-making construct. The findings of this study contribute to CSP scholarship by harmonizing complementary but disparate lenses in management and social science on inter-organizational CSPs into a systematic, evidence-based view of multi-stakeholder engagement and cooperation. Furthermore, this study narrows the research-practice gap by providing a unifying foundation for collaborative CSP dynamics that is cross-validated with real-world practitioner perspectives. Theoretical perspectives on CSPs are prevalent but siloed, with management and social science disciplines featuring discipline-specific, project-centered, and process-based conceptualizations that provide important but narrow CSP characterizations. These perspectives highlight the importance of organizational motivations or purposes for partnering, yet provide incomplete discourse on important operational contexts that dictate the terms of engagement and management strategies among partners. Transaction cost theory, for example, highlights efficiency-seeking motivations but does not consider contextual factors that drive the strategic risks of engagement. Resource-based imperatives for cooperation do not characterize the larger economic and market contexts that cause variation in the pace and impact of CSP outcomes. Theoretical models that consider the influence of operational conditions or context on CSP engagement do not comprehensively account for relational dimensions that drive CSP dynamics. Stakeholder-based models prioritize relational aspects of collaborative dynamics but underemphasize asymmetric organizational intents such as partnering to enhance competitive advantage. Design and innovation sciences highlight stakeholder motivations in decision-making processes as a predominant driver of inter-organizational engagement in strongly coupled problem-framing and solution-development spaces. The study's findings suggest that PCT comprehensively characterizes collaborative CSP dynamics and offers a foundational view of CSP best practices. The theory's robustness and relevance are supported by the analysis of peer-reviewed publications and practitioner interviews, providing a unifying foundation for collaborative CSP dynamics that is cross-validated with real-world practitioner perspectives.