Partnerships are perceived as arrangements that can further the drive for sustainable development. In that role, they provide a managerial response to the general ethical ideal of societal progress. Collaborative arrangements in which actors from two or more spheres of society (state, market and civil society) are involved in a non-hierarchical process through which these actors strive for a sustainability goal. Partnership practices may be seen as both idealistic and structural specifications of that philosophy in a more operational governance paradigm. The main premises can be summarize underpinning this partnership paradigm as follows:
