Partnerships bring together diverse expertise, knowledge and audiences. More and more regulators work with partners to develop solutions to complex problems and to deliver better environmental and human health outcomes.
Why you should partner with us
We recognise the value of working with organisations who have specific technical expertise, knowledge, skills and networks. Our partnerships help us to solve environmental problems and address environmental challenges together. They also allow us to increase engagement between the public, private, Not-For-Profit, community and education and research sectors, and accelerate the delivery of EPA priorities – water quality, climate change, environmental sustainability, emerging toxins, forestry and odour.
What guides our partnerships?
Our Strategic Plan 2021 – 24 and Regulatory Strategy, recognise that partnerships are a key engagement approach to support and deliver our initiatives.
We support the United Nations Development Goal 17 for sustainable development that states that a successful development agenda requires inclusive partnerships.
Our approach to partnerships
We see partnerships as collaborative relationships that deliver solutions to complex problems. Our partnership approach involves two or more groups coming together to address a common environmental challenge, combine resources and competencies and share risk to maximise value creation and deliver mutual benefit. They are context specific and formed to address a specific challenge or issue and they may be short or long term.
Every partnership is unique, but there are some key attributes that lead to effective partnerships.
Collaborative: longer-term, non-transactional relationship between multiple parties.
Cross sector: includes different stakeholder types such as government, civil society, business, NGOs, and academia.
Shared interest: overlapping interest around an environmental challenge – if there is a shared problem, there is astrong reason to partner.
Compatiblity: organisational mandates, risk appetite and conflicts of interest.
Complimentarity: deliberately seeking difference in skills, expertise, channels and assets to improve or emphasize value.
Sharing of risk: all parties share risk and have an incentive to engage.
Significant synergies – win/win: the outcome from partnership approach is much greater than single organisation approach with conventional supply contracts or grants. Each individual partner achieves a net benefit.
The difference between a supplier and a partner
A partnership is a relationship based on mutual trust, openness, a long-term commitment for change, and a shared approach to risk and success that cannot be achieved through the efforts of either organisation alone.
The partnership approach will vary depending on the complexity of the environmental problem, the organisations involved, the capacity and resources to commit and the willingness to share risk.
Some problems will be addressed best through a supplier arrangement, others will benefit from a partnership arrangement.
The supplier/partnership relationship is a spectrum – relationships with more features from the left hand column are likely to be a supplier arrangement, relationships with more features from the right hand column are likely to be a partnership arrangement.
Conventional supply arrangement | Full partnership arrangement |
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The partnership team
The key functions of our partnership team are to
- build consistency of approach
- support teams to explore, identify, establish and review strategic partnerships
- increase visibility of partnerships across the agency and connect staff to resources and support
- increase external visibility and provide a gateway for potential partners to engage with the EPA
- develop tools to increase capability and support best practice
2023 Sustainability Partnerships program
The 2023 Sustainability Partnerships program sought to partner with organisations that want to act on climate change.
Our focus is on enabling and supporting best practice and building collaborative processes to ensure any actions we take are meaningful, feasible and cost-effective
A successful partnership is rooted in shared understanding, transparency, and clear communication. We have devised a series of criteria and intended outcomes outlining what we hope to achieve through partnerships.
- Focus on gaps in climate change action and not duplicate existing efforts
- Improve the EPA’s understanding of industry and regulated community needs (e.g. agricultural sector, waste sector local government)
- Support pilots that meet one or more policy or funding gaps, which could inform future programs for the EPA.
- Improve community perception of the EPA’s role in climate change
- Strengthen the EPA's regulatory role through the continued implementation of its Regulatory Strategy and Policy (Listen, Educate, Enable, Influence).
Our 2023 Sustainability Partners
- Australasian College for Emergency Medicine (ACEM) – This will be the first project to ever quantify the additional emergency departments (ED) workload, costs and resource implications from climate change across EDs accredited by ACEM, which account for the majority (75%) of all ED presentations across NSW.
- Boomerang Labs – A specialist program for circular economy startups, providing the skills and support required to scale and commercialise.
- Charitable Recycling – This project will develop a methodology to measure data on reuse, taking into account the environmental, economic, and social impacts associated with reuse.
- Civic Future Labs – Leveraging advanced technologies such as blockchain and data analytics to enable transparent and traceable circular materials and emissions data exchange, this project will help inform decision makers through a collaborative digital platform.
- Dairy Up – This project will build on the work and relationships with Farms that Dairy Up to capture additional data on pasture/crop, soil and animal levels to estimate more robust net Carbon emissions and balances in NSW dairy farms.
- Hunter Joint Organisation –An emissions data management program will be developed to accelerate emissions reduction activities for council-owned landfills in the Hunter. The project brings together measurement, reporting, and communications to better understand landfill emissions profiles and inform climate mitigation strategies.