What’s learning got to do with sustainability-oriented cross-sector partnerships? A systematic literature review

Abstract Sustainability-oriented cross-sector partnerships (CSPs) have emerged as a key business approach to collectivize resources, knowledge, and capabilities in pursuit of sustainability transformations. Yet, the role of learning within them remains underexplored. This Systematic Literature Review synthesizes 83 peer-reviewed articles (1992–2024) from 896, adopting a qualitative, abductive research design and reflexive thematic analysis to examine learning across individual, organisational, and partnership levels in business-involved CSPs. The paper makes three key contributions. First, drawing on social learning theory, it develops a multilevel framework of learning in CSPs integrating processes, outcomes, and cross-level patterns. Second, it introduces five analytical dimensions categorizing CSP types and their partnership configurations’ associations with learning patterns. Third, it identifies four critical contingency factors—trust, actor diversity, power, and time pressure—that shape learning dynamics. Positioning CSPs as generative learning environments and foregrounding the underexamined individual dimension, this study contributes to the CSP and organisational learning literatures by expanding the research on how multi-level learning enables capability development for sustainability transformation.