How to build growth-ready governance for long-term delivery?

As the UK navigates economic disruption, AI adoption, public service reform, and the transition to net zero, cross-sector collaboration is becoming increasingly important to delivering the UK’s Industrial Strategy and wider growth agenda. Our 2025 research found that 92% of leaders believe collaboration between business, government, and civil society is essential to driving economic growth and positive policy outcomes. Successful delivery depends on governance structures that can hold under pressure or amid uncertainty. This includes structures that define decision-making, manage tensions, and maintain accountability as partnerships evolve beyond traditional boundaries.

Drawing on WIG’s Collaboration Playbook, researched and written by the Blavatnik School of Government, and our 2025 report Delivering Economic Growth in Partnership, produced in partnership with Global Government Forum, we explore what growth-ready governance looks like in practice and what senior leaders need to get right to make cross-sector collaboration deliver.

Key takeaways:

• By creating clarity around roles, accountability, and decision-making, governance can help accelerate collaboration.
• The most effective partnerships choose governance structures deliberately based on trust levels, partner complexity, and shared objectives.
• Accountability must be built into the structure of collaboration through visible commitments, transparent reporting, and shared delivery mechanisms.
• Governance should operate as a living system that evolves alongside delivery by regularly reviewing participation, decision-making, and implementation pressures.

Why is governance the ‘spine’ of cross-sector collaboration and long-term delivery?

Leaders interviewed for the Delivering Economic Growth in Partnership report were clear: governance is an operating structure that enables organisations with different mandates, incentives, cultures, and accountabilities to work together over time.

Without clear governance, even strong partnerships can begin to fragment during delivery. Decision-making becomes unclear, competing priorities create friction, and accountability becomes difficult to track.  Effective governance, by contrast, accelerates collaboration by clarifying roles, escalation routes, and decision rights before pressure emerges, enabling partnerships to spend less time managing confusion and more time delivering results.

As one senior government leader noted in the GGF report:

“We’re collaborators, but I’m not giving you my accountabilities. I cannot transfer my accountabilities to Parliament to you; that’s my lane.”

Successful cross-sector collaboration depends on defining responsibilities explicitly from the outset, not assuming alignment will hold under pressure.

1. Define roles and accountability early 

Shared ambition alone is not enough for delivery. Cross-sector partnerships need clear agreements on responsibilities, decision-making, and how tensions will be resolved when priorities compete.

Formal governance mechanisms such as Memoranda of Understanding, shared values statements, and agreed rules of engagement help establish clarity before delivery challenges emerge.

This is not bureaucracy for its own sake; it is the infrastructure that protects trust when pressure arrives.

The strongest collaborations make accountability visible early, rather than relying on goodwill later.

2. Choose governance structures deliberately

Governance structures should reflect the complexity, trust levels, and goals of the collaboration itself.

WIG’s Collaboration Playbook identifies three core governance models:

• Self-governed: partners share responsibility equally with minimal hierarchy. Best suited to smaller collaborations with high trust and aligned goals.
• Lead organisation: one partner convenes and coordinates the work while decisions remain jointly agreed. Useful where collaboration involves more participants or moderate alignment.
• Network Administrative Organisation (NAO): a dedicated coordinating body or individual manages operational delivery across partners.

The Wisbech Regeneration Partnership in Cambridgeshire demonstrated the value of the NAO model in practice. A senior manager from Anglian Water was seconded to the Fenland District Council to coordinate collaboration across five levels of government. Acting as a boundary-spanning coordinator, the role helped bridge institutional and cultural differences that had previously prevented alignment. The partnership was able to progress regeneration investment that had stalled across multiple authorities, and no single organisation could have unlocked it alone.

The key lesson is that governance structures should be designed intentionally, not inherited by default. 

3. Build accountability into the structure

When organisations believe their input genuinely influences outcomes, they remain invested in delivery. Strong relationships matter, but long-term collaboration cannot rely on goodwill alone. Effective governance makes commitments visible and progress measurable across all partners.

France 2030, the French government’s €54 billion economic transformation programme (as examined in our Delivering Economic Growth in Partnership report), demonstrates how governance can operate effectively at scale. Strategic committees set direction, operational committees review delivery, and external representatives from research, business, and civil society contribute to decision-making. Local governance structures ensure national priorities remain connected to regional delivery realities.

The result is a governance system designed to balance strategic coordination with continuous adaptation.

At the project level, accountability depends on making partner commitments visible and progress measurable. Transparent reporting mechanisms create what one interviewee described as a “psychological responsibility”: a shared expectation that publicly made commitments must also be delivered publicly.

This also helps reduce one of the most common causes of partnership breakdown: organisations seeking unilateral credit for collective work.

Australia’s Market Stewardship model, developed by the Australian Public Service Commission (also featured in our Delivering Economic Growth in Partnership report), offers another example. By creating a named “market steward” role and shared system maps across sectors, the approach ensures external stakeholders are involved in shaping delivery rather than responding after decisions have already been made. 

4. Treat governance as a living system

One of the clearest insights from both reports was that governance cannot remain static. Effective governance systems evolve alongside delivery, enabling partnerships to adapt to changing priorities, new evidence, and delivery pressures without losing the accountability structures that hold them together.

The instinct in large programmes is often to design governance upfront and then preserve it rigidly. But leaders consistently warned that governance which cannot adapt eventually becomes an obstacle rather than an enabler.

Growth-ready governance requires regular review points and clear diagnostic questions, including:

• Are some stakeholders excluded from decision-making?
• Are powerful partners exempt from agreed processes?
• Are lower-power organisations struggling to participate effectively?
• Are implementation costs being shared fairly?

These should be treated as regular review questions rather than signs of failure. The goal is not to eliminate tension, but to surface it early enough to adapt.

The report also highlighted a common leadership mistake: closing difficult conversations prematurely in the name of progress. Governance systems that suppress disagreement often create a false consensus, storing up conflict for later stages of delivery.

Strong governance creates space for challenge, adaptation, and structured dialogue throughout the life of the partnership. 

What this means for UK leaders

To conclude, effective delivery requires governance structures that clarify accountability, support trust, enable adaptability, and sustain delivery over time.

Before launching any major cross-sector initiative, leaders should ask:

• Have we defined accountability clearly across all partners?
• Does our governance structure match the scale and complexity of the work?
• Are partner commitments visible and progress measurable?
• Have we built in review points that allow governance to evolve as delivery changes?

At WIG, we work with senior leaders across business, government, and civil society to develop the capabilities, convene strategic dialogue, and evidence best practices that turn collaboration from ambition into delivery.

Because ambition without structure is not enough. The UK’s growth agenda will ultimately be won or lost in implementation, and governance is where implementation begins for long-term delivery.