Partnerships and governance at the environment-health nexus in Ontario: lessons from five case examples

The move towards partnerships and collaborative governance models has been advocated in global health discussions for many years now. A case example methodology was applied to this study. It was composed of a document review and semi-structured interviews with key informants from five environment and public health partnerships in the province of Ontario, Canada. These case examples highlight the merits and the challenges of diverse partnerships, and the importance of governance and leadership models, scaling up (and out) impact, and cross-cultural communications to these arrangements. Further work is required to articulate situations in which public health partnerships can be strengthened.