The Partnerships Resource Centre

Prof. dr Rob van Tulder is the academic director and founder of the Partnerships Resource Centre. He is also co-founder of the department of Business-Society at RSM (1997), which now is a world leader in issues of sustainability and corporate social responsibility. He coordinates the SCOPE databank project which keeps track of the strategies of the largest multinational companies in the world. His particular interests are in international business, sustainability, issues management and cross sector partnerships. He has published extensively on these topics in academic as well as more popular settings. His numerous books are highly acclaimed in both academic and entrepreneurial circles. His publications have received many awards, while his books have twice been nominated as ‘best management’ book in the Netherlands. He ranked amongst the 100 most sustainable Dutchmen. Van Tulder teaches executive courses on International Strategic Management and Sustainability aimed at (executive) managers and academics. He acts as a consultant for international organisations, ministries, international companies and NGOs. He has been visiting professor at several renowned international institutes. Rob van Tulder holds a PhD degree (cum laude) in social sciences from the University of Amsterdam.

Since 2014, Marieke de Wal is managing director of the Partnerships Resource Centre.

Her approach can be characterized by pro-active social stakeholder engagement in all phases of research – design, implementation (data-collection), validation (sense-making), and dissemination (publication of lessons and insights and tool development). She was involved in Promoting Effective Partnering (PEP), a knowledge sharing initiative, inspired by the inquiry ‘what will it take to unleash the partnering potential for the SDGs?’ PEP aims to promote better access to proven partnering knowledge and to identify and fill gaps in expertise. Marieke was coordinating PPPLab, a learning initiative which aims to extract and co-create knowledge and methodological lessons from and on PPPs that can be used to improve both implementation and policy.

Currently, she is involved in several action research projects, including the strategy development of the Global Diplomacy Lab (GDL), an international member-driven platform that explores a new and more inclusive diplomacy which goes beyond traditional politics.

Before joining PrC, Marieke was managing consultant at the Dutch consultancy firm Berenschot where she specialised in process evaluation studies and public-private partnerships. Marieke is an accredited member of the Partnership Brokers Association (PBA). She studied Philosophy at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Adodo Abalo, Agricultural Economist, has 10 years of experience in development and agricultural research. As partnership facilitator, he coordinated several agribusiness partnerships with small stakeholders (27 in 2010, 15 in 2011 and 10 from 2012 to 2013). These partnerships were set up and supported gradually from 2006 through IFDC’s development projects: 1000s + (2006-2010), AAA-Bridge (2011) and 2SCALE (from 2012). The principal role of these partnership was the promotion of agribusiness for small producers and agricultural entrepreneurs through the development of agricultural commodity value chains. After graduating from the University of Lomé, Adodo worked in a NGO which is promoting income-generating activities for the poorest households in urban and suburbs areas. Following to this experience, he was recruited to the University of Lomé as Research Assistant in the Laboratory for Research on Poverty and Sustainable Food Security (LARPSAD) and later in IFDC. Abalo contributed to several research papers on trade in West Africa. Since March 2015, he is responsible for action-research for The Partnership Resource Centre (PrC) in West-Africa with the 2SCALE project.

Denise Carvalho is a postdoctoral student at the Partnerships Resource Centre. Her main research interests are Cross-sector Partnerships, Wicked Problems and Sustainability on the water and sanitation sector. Her postdoctoral project has focus on public policies for encouraging and fostering cross-sector partnership in developing countries such as Brazil. This research is aligned with her PhD thesis about ‘Tripartite Partnerships on Water and Sanitation and the wickedness of the sector in Brazil’, where she analyzed the institutional constraints that can affect these arrangements in the country.

Denise is a Civil Engineer and holds a master’s degree in Organizational Strategy. She worked for many years in the areas of planning and controlling in an infrastructure sector private organization in Brazil. She also holds three MBA degree courses, in Controlling, Finance and Business Management. She lives in Curitiba, south Brazil, with her husband and daughter.

As Research Fellow Partnerships and Inclusive Development, Marijn's interest is in understanding collaboration processes between governments, NGOs, and businesses to address pressing societal challenges including poverty, climate change and hunger. In her research, she builds on her prior experiences including her PhD research, in which she analyzed actor strategies to influence multi-actor policy-making processes around climate-smart agriculture.

Furthermore, she has researched partnership alliances between Dutch development organizations to build resilience in Global South. Marijn has conducted research in Asia, East Africa, and Latin America. In her research, she values a processual approach to social phenomena. She has developed expertise on both qualitative and quentitative methods, including process-tracing and multivariate regression analysis.

Marijn is a research editor of the Annual Review of Social Partnerships (ARSP). She has been visiting researcher with the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) Africa, and with the Governance, Environment and Markets initiative (GEM) of Yale University. She holds a research master in International Development Studies and a master in Political Science, both from the University of Amsterdam.

Annette Pelkmans-Balaoing is a Senior Research Associate in the Partnership Resource Center.  She is also a co-convenor of the Chains-for-Change Partnership Center for Inclusiveness and Competitiveness, based at the University of the Philippines.  She is a trade and development economist, who taught in the Erasmus School of Economics from 2009 till 2016.  Her research interest revolve around the topics of regional economic integration, value chains, middle-income country trap, inclusive business models in agricultural value chains,  and inclusive financing models. 

As a Senior Research Fellow, Greetje focuses on understanding partnering processes between NGOs, businesses and governments, mainly in the field of sustainable food and agriculture. Within this broad field she developed two main research lines. The first is on private governance arrangements and their relation to other regulatory arrangements, mainly in the global South. The second centers on the role of partnerships in processes of inclusive development. 

Within her research, Greetje aims to apply and advance qualitative methodologies, among which comparative configurational methodologies (e.g. QCA) and process tracing. Most of the research projects she is involved in have an action research component. 

Greetje teaches the elective ‘Cross-Sector Partnerships for Sustainable Development’ in the Master program Global Business and Sustainability. In this course, students are encouraged to critically analyze the concept of cross-sector partnerships, their role in sustainable development and their possible impact and frailties.

Dr Sietze Vellema’s interest is to understand why and how different actors collaborate in solving organisational, managerial, and technical problems related to inclusive development and sustainable food provision. Sietze: “The interdisciplinary nature of the Partnership Resource Centre and the connectivity to the practice of partnerships makes it an interesting place to be”.

Sietze’s research at the PrC focuses on partnerships related to sustainability standards implemented in global value chains. The research informs discussions about how cross-sector partnership make a difference compared to business to business partnerships, how partnerships are able to accommodate locally embedded sustainability initiatives, and how partnerships convene including the public domain connects into market-led initiatives. Sietze leads the action research with the 2SCALE project in West and East Africa. This contributes to refining theories of change underlying partnerships, documenting and reviewing change processes set in motion by partnerships, and supporting strategising by partners. Sietze’s research combines development, organisation, and technology studies with a focus on partnerships, certification and institutional arrangements in global value chains, and contract farming. He supervises PhD candidates and contributes to methodological discussions about integrative research and impact evaluation.