How Donors Shape International Cross-Sector Partnership Solutions: An Analysis of Worker Safety Initiatives

The growth of international cross-sector partnerships (ICSPs) has sparked management scholars’ interest in their processes, outputs, and impacts, mainly through case-study analyses. These studies often overlook important questions about ICSPs’ finance and organisation which can reveal the influence of the respective partnership members over the nature of the ICSP solutions to societal challenges. This paper examines who funds ICSP initiatives for worker safety and how donor identities (sectors and nationalities) shape the ICSP solutions in terms of their choices of implementation partners, focal issues, and implementation methods. We do so through analysis of a novel database of 109 ICSP initiatives addressing worker safety in the Bangladesh ready-made garment industry, following the Rana Plaza factory collapse in 2013. The paper first reveals that, contrary to inferences that might be made from the management literature, governments, particularly from the global North, play a dominant role in financing ICSPs. Secondly, the paper demonstrates that the initiatives’ preferred solutions reflect the identity of the ICSP donors in terms of sector (governmental, business, or civil society) and nationality (North American or European), raising questions about the influence of donors in ICSPs. Thirdly, the paper shows how ICSPs offer diverse solutions to the common target problem, worker safety, prompting discussion about the merits of ICSPs supporting a diverse range of topics (pluralism) versus more coordinated ICSP approaches (orchestration).