Partnerships and relations

Partnerships are essential to increase the ILO's outreach and influence, enlarging its access to the many new aid modalities, bringing its ideas closer to spheres of influence, and offering synergies that leverage the assets available, including financial resources, technical capabilities and expertise to deliver decent work. Through partnerships constituents obtain access to decision-making circles. At the national level partnerships enable the ILO to tap national expertise and networks to better deliver decent work.

The ILO works with its constituents to initiate and strengthen partnerships with a wide range of actors at international, regional and national levels: UN funds, programmes and agencies, the World Bank and other international financial institutions, donor agencies, regional organizations, the private sector, NGOs, faith-based institutions, academia, and parliamentarians’ organizations.

Public-private partnerships combining ILO expertise with that of private enterprises, trade unions and governments are also pursued. Work with the non-governmental sector as partners or beneficiaries of ILO programmes will continue to be strengthened wherever this proves useful to advance decent work objectives.

The increasing role of South-South cooperation can be assisted by the ILO through partnerships, in particular where sharing knowledge and expertise can usefully complement bilateral cooperation.

Full and productive employment and decent work for all is now a global goal and an MDG target, endorsed by the UN World Summit of 2005 and ECOSOC, which called on all international organizations "to contribute to the goal of decent work for all through their policies, programmes and activities, and requested the ILO for this purpose to promote and support the mainstreaming of the Decent Work Agenda throughout the multilateral system and to support collaboration and inter-agency partnerships within the UN system and with the Bretton Woods institutions."

The ECOSOC Ministerial Declaration of 2006 called on the ILO to focus on the implementation of the commitments regarding the promotion of full and productive employment and decent work for all made at the major UN conferences and summits, including the 2005 World Summit and the World Summit for Social Development, in order to achieve significant progress in both policy and operational programmes, and requested the ILO to work towards timebound action plans to run to 2015 in collaboration with all relevant parties.

The CEB Toolkit for Mainstreaming Employment and Decent Work led by the ILO to facilitate this process will continue to promote policy and operational coherence across the multilateral system. Through the “Delivering as One” UN reform process and the implementation of the TCPR for 2007-2010, the ILO will continue to forge strong partnerships with the UN system to improve coordination and fully integrate the Decent Work Agenda into national development policies.

Decent work has received increasing endorsement and support over the past few years at both international and regional level. For a selection of such texts, see Statements on Decent Work and the Social Dimension of Globalization in Multilateral Bodies