Kris M Balderston: We want people to know that what they’re going to buy is going to be good
Kris M Balderston is the Special Representative for Global Partnerships at the Global Partnership Initiative in the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s office, where he leads the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves in Washington, DC. He was previously Clinton’s first legislative director, when she was in the Senate, before serving as her Deputy Chief of Staff. Since the cookstoves initiative was launched in 2010, the Alliance has 400 partners and ties with 34 countries, a third of which are donors and the rest are implementers. Here, in an interview with Sujata Srinivasan of Forbes India, Balderston talks about how the Alliance is enabling shared value creation through public-private partnerships and what the key challenges are in bringing India on board.
Q. What is the role of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves in enabling shared value creation through public-private partnerships?
Everything we do at the Global Partnership Initiative [in the US Secretary of State’s Office] is going to create a platform that is a public-private partnership. Every one of the models has this shared value idea. So, when we went to India, we tried to find those partnerships. If we want to truly be a market-driven approach, we just can’t talk to government and NGOs–we want to talk to the business sector because they’re going to be more tuned in to the fact that money could be made. Communities and markets could be stabilised and they have an incentive to do this. Morgan Stanley came in–they’re interested in carbon credits. Dow Corning came in—they’re interested in expanding the local networks in Africa and India. Shell Oil came in—they’re looking at diversifying their base. We went to the United Nations Foundation. Then we said let’s go to countries–what is their shared value? And now we have 34 countries that have come in to the Global Alliance.