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Lea Stadtler¹
¹Grenoble Ecole de Management, France
Imagine a long running collaboration between government agencies and nonprofit organizations that, after years of coordination, funding, trust building, and shared effort, has delivered real progress on a stubborn social problem. As the main goal comes into view, attention begins to shift toward closing the initiative down. Reports are drafted, timelines are fixed, and exit plans are discussed. From the outside, it looks like a success story reaching its natural conclusion.
Inside the collaboration, however, things feel far more complicated. Partners worry about what will happen to the services, infrastructure, and relationships they have built together. Some organizations are ready to move on, while others depend heavily on what the collaboration has created. At the same time, the final steps are difficult to complete while staff are tired, additional funding is hard to secure, and the partnership’s legitimacy to act beyond its formal mandate is limited. What appears to be a neat ending on paper begins to feel more like a delicate balancing act in practice.
This scenario is far from rare. Yet in both research and practice, partnership termination is often treated as a technical afterthought, an administrative exit rather than a meaningful phase of collaboration. My study, published in NVSQ, challenges that view by showing that how partnerships end deserves much more attention, not least because it shapes whether hard won outcomes are sustained or quietly reversed.
What is this study about?
The study examines partnership termination through an in depth case analysis of a global disease focused collaboration involving public and nonprofit organizations. Unlike many collaborative initiatives that end abruptly due to conflict or loss of funding, this partnership was designed from the start to come to an end once its goal had been achieved. This makes it a suitable example of planned termination.
To understand what actually happens when such a partnership winds down, I drew on a wide range of material, including internal documents, recorded meetings, public communications, and interviews with key participants across organizations and levels. I thereby aimed to understand the partnership as a complex entity shaped by collaboration dynamics, the needs and constraints of individual partner organizations, and the wider social and institutional environment. Termination then becomes not a single moment of exit, but a process unfolding over time and across multiple sites.
What did I find?
The main insight from the study is that ending a partnership is not simply about stopping activities. It is about coordinating several interdependent processes at once.
In the case examined here, the ending involved three processes that needed to move forward together if the partnership was to conclude responsibly. The first concerned completing the shared goal. As the partnership moved closer to its objective, progress slowed and became more complex. Reaching the final populations affected by the disease required adapting to difficult local conditions and navigating political, logistical, and resource constraints. What looked close to completion at a global level still demanded sustained effort on the ground.
At the same time, partner organizations had to begin winding down their involvement. This involved reallocating staff, managing fatigue after years of intensive collaboration, and preparing for futures beyond the partnership. While some organizations were able to plan their next steps with confidence, others had to find solutions for the resource gaps that the partnership ending would imply for them.
A third process focused on what would happen to the assets and infrastructure created by the collaboration. These assets included knowledge, data systems, networks, and physical infrastructure. Transferring them to public institutions or other actors was essential for sustaining outcomes, yet it proved challenging when those actors lacked sufficient capacity, resources, or political support.
What made this phase particularly demanding was the interdependence of these processes. Asset transfer could not happen safely before sufficient progress had been made toward the shared goal. Organizations could not fully withdraw while they still felt responsible for outcomes. Progress or delay in one area directly shaped what was possible in the others. As a result, ending the collaboration required careful pacing and ongoing coordination rather than adherence to a fixed end date.
As these processes unfolded, partners encountered increasing tensions. External realities such as funding limits and political pressures complicated the ending. Internally, attention shifted from a shared future to individual organizational priorities and differences emerged over what it really meant to say that the work was finished. Rather than being resolved neatly, these tensions were managed through a series of practical adjustments. Timelines were extended, additional resources were sought, and responsibilities were delegated to other entities. The ending became a gradual transition rather than a clean break, blending into new initiatives and ongoing public action.
So why does ending a partnership deserve more attention?
The findings point to three interconnected reasons. First, ending a partnership is critical for sustaining outcomes rather than reversing them. Decisions made during the final phase shape whether services continue, capacities are preserved, and trust built over years is maintained. Treating termination as a simple exit risks undermining precisely what collaboration was meant to achieve.
Second, partnership endings are often far more complex than anticipated. They involve multiple interdependent processes unfolding across organizational, partnership, and system levels. When this complexity is underestimated, endings become sites of frustration, delay, and unintended gaps.
Third, anticipating the ending has important implications well beyond the final phase itself. Thinking seriously about how a partnership should conclude influences how goals are defined, how responsibilities are distributed, and how capacities are built during formation and implementation. Ending well begins much earlier than is often assumed and considering it a transition rather than exit may provide a helpful starting point for taking it seriously.
Click here to read the free full-text article: Stadtler, L. (2026). Beyond Exit: The Multilevel Dynamics of Partnership Termination. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/08997640261448568
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