In a fragmented world, innovative partnerships are more essential than ever

9 juillet 2025

In today’s increasingly fractured geopolitical landscape – marked by global power shifts, deepening divides and regulatory uncertainty – partnerships are more critical than ever. But in practice, too many remain under resourced, overly transactional or siloed. At a time when no single actor can drive systems change alone, bold collaboration has become a strategic necessity.

This is the animating purpose behind the GAEA Awards. Launched by the World Economic Forum in 2024 in partnership with partners including Fondation Lombard Odier and global management consulting firm Kearney, the Awards seek to recognize and support transformative multi-stakeholder partnerships driving action across climate and nature. These collaborations cut across philanthropy, business, government and civil society to accelerate outcomes no one sector could achieve alone.

In the recently released white paper, Making Collaboration Work for Climate and Nature, the GAEA Awards team draws on the experiences of our awardees and broader research to outline three partnership archetypes that are showing outsized transformative potential:

Joint ventures and strategic alliances that pool risk and co-develop innovation
Industry-wide alliances that align stakeholders around a specific interest to deliver commitments and support shared standards and incentives
Cross-sector partnerships that deliver long-term infrastructure and institutional change

Our inaugural GAEA Awardees exemplify these models in action:

GEAPP (Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet), which embodies cross-sector partnerships by catalyzing clean energy transitions in emerging economies through an ecosystem of philanthropies, investors and governments.
HYBRIT, a pioneering joint venture between SSAB, LKAB, and Vattenfall, leading innovation in fossil-free steel production.
Decarbonising Rice, a community-rooted collaboration among research institutes, tackling one of the world’s most emissions-intensive staples by working directly with farmer cooperatives and philanthropies to decarbonize rice farming systems.
Built by Nature, which works as an industry-wide alliance accelerating nature-positive construction practices through local networks of actors across the construction industry.
Youth Climate Justice Fund, which showcases grassroots-centered collaboration that empowers youth-led movements to drive climate justice and climate action.

From case studies of the GAEA Awards awardees and finalists, as well as practical insights form the broader Awards community, several practical lessons emerge about building and implementing innovative collaboration models:

Start small, build on what’s there. Many of the most successful partnerships began with small, trusted networks and evolved from existing models. Deep early engagement, rather than scale, created the conditions for later transformation.
Engage the private sector creatively and early. Partnerships that meaningfully scale often engage businesses as co-designers, not late-stage implementers.
Invest in governance. Operational independent, transparency and clear decision rights build resilience. Structured governance can enable long-term collaboration – even among competitors.
Get pragmatic about measuring impact. Measuring systems change is hard, particularly in the early stages of an initiative. Adopt proxy metrics like engagement levels to demonstrate momentum when longer-term outcomes are still emerging.
Design for scale from the outset. Even small pilots should be built with scalability and “investability” in mind.

At a time when it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by complexity, the GAEA Awards offers something powerful: proof that systems change is not only possible – it’s already happening.

Explore the full white paper here.