I am looking for partners who want to talk about community energy, who have a cooperative, who are working in the field of renewable energy to push through the solar campaign, we need to move to a new type of energy for the future, and we need to do it quickly.

One challenge that we certainly are seeing around partnership is the measurement of impact because, of course, we believe and have a hypothesis that working together leads to better outcomes. But we need to be able to prove that in a world where there’s less financing to go around.

We start with an objective that we want to achieve in a way that is flexible because co-creation is fundamental to partnerships. We don’t want to have that whole idea baked before we find partners.

I would love to see a grand collaboration put in place quickly over the next few months, for COP 26. An alliance for humanity. An alliance for humanitarian action against climate change involving the best of civil society with the best of government, the best of the military, the best of academia, the best of the private sector and philanthropists.

A lead agency role involves a lot of skilful facilitation, a lot of political astuteness. A lot of emotional intelligence needs to be applied into the space, and a lot of sweat effort bilaterally with the individual partners if things are going awry, and helping people to come back to the table. And resolving issues as all sorts of feather-ruffling goes on.

It’s difficult to chair a partnership as a lead agency and be the sort of coach of the partnering process. So successful partnerships, I think, bring in that external element sort of Call, call it out. And that’s a great role for expert organizations who have experience in brokering partnerships.