And If We (Ever) Achieved Our Goal? Challenges of Winding Down a Social Partnership

Cross-sector partnership (CSP) scholars agree on the beneficial role that a clear collaborative goal plays especially in the early stages of the partnering life cycle. For example, it may help direct and align diverse partners, stabilize their relationships, and help mobilize partnership support. But given CSPs’ dynamic nature, it is unlikely that the CSP goal and its implications remain stable along the partnership journey. To forge a comprehensive understanding of governance via goals in CSPs, we explore how the role and implications of an (initially) clear CSP goal evolve along the partnering life cycle. Based on an inductive analysis of a disease-elimination CSP that, after more than 30 years of operations, was close to achieving its goal and prepared for winding down, we illustrate how the CSP goal evolved from initially facilitating the partnering process to becoming increasingly complex and ultimately challenging the aspired winding down of the CSP. We delineate the mechanisms underlying such goal complexification, which brings to the fore the limitations of conceptualizing CSPs as goal-centric, temporary structures without acknowledging their growing embeddedness in complex social systems.