Multi-stakeholder partnerships (MSPs)

The ILO is engaged in or associated with a wide range of multi-stakeholder partnerships (MSPs) at the global, regional, and national levels, in almost all policy areas: Employment, Social Protection, Sustainable Enterprises, Child and Forced Labour, Migration, Social Finance, Skills, Occupational Health and Safety, Just Transition, Gender and non-discrimination.

Each Multi-stakeholder partnership (MSP) is a formal or partially formal alliance of partners, which includes employers’ and workers organisations along with partners from at least two of these groups: government and government- driven institutions, regional groups, local authorities, civil society actors, private sector, Academia, UN, and multilateral organisations. For instance, South-South and Triangular Cooperation initiatives are inclusive and horizontal MSPs based on trust and equality, allowing the co-creation of solutions to address current development challenges.

MSPs and policy coherence

Alliances are crucial to promoting policy coherence and renewing the commitments of partners. For instance:

• The Social Protection Inter-Agency cooperation board (SPIAC-B) and the Global Partnership for Universal Social Protection to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (USP2030) developed a set of assessment tools to assist design, implementation, joint development partner analysis and policy recommendations.
• The Climate Action for Jobs initiative (CA4J) provides a global innovation hub on just transition as well as a mechanism for pooling funding for country-level technical assistance and a facility for advocacy and youth.

An essential tool at regional and country level 

MSPs also engage at the regional and country levels, where the MSP cooperation modality is pivotal to advancing the commitment of a set of partners. For instance:

• ILO Cooperation with regional organisations (ASEAN, African Union) has been developed with an MSP approach (Migration and Migration statistics)
• Alliance 8.7 has identified 30 pathfinder countries that are developing a roadmap of activities to accelerate programmes and report on them.
• In Latin America and the Arab States regions, a space for stakeholders and social partners has been developed to provide access and capacity building to engage in Common Country Analysis and Cooperation Framework processes (in Latin America and the ILO Regional Office for Arab States)