‘Crossing the River by Feeling the Stones’ — A Portfolio Approach to Governance in Malawi
By Claire Medina, Deputy Resident Representative UNDP Malawi
Over the past few years, UNDP as an organization has been experimenting with ways in which development interventions can be more flexible and respond to the rapidly changing circumstances which governments are facing.
In Malawi, we have been on the forefront of these efforts in doing development differently, from new ways of partnering with the private sector through challenge funds, to digital identity, and mapping poverty hotspots with real time impacts of service delivery. We have embraced ‘innovation’ across our portfolio to the point where our Regional Director wrote last year to say that the country office is one of the leading disrupters from business-as-usual approaches. Now disruption is not a word we have been used to hearing in UNDP, but as the saying goes: ‘if the shoe fits, wear it’…
It is in this context that early last year, with the support of the Chôra Foundation, we began to get more imaginative — looking at new approaches that would take us beyond the confines of traditional projects to the development system itself. Meaning, how can we move from a discussion about project outputs to designing a comprehensive portfolio of coherent options (acting on leverage points) aimed at system transformation?
Applying a ‘sensemaking’ logic is intellectually and conceptually stretching for those of us that have worked in development for a while. Paraphrasing a point made by Adam Kahane in a podcast on disruptive conversations (albeit in a different context), the current dominant model of collaboration is one of agreement — we agree on a problem, a solution, and then a plan to get there. While this approach can work well within a single institution, it may not be so effective in cases of social and development complexity that are intrinsically characterized by a lack of control. As development challenges are getting more complex and interlinked, so we need more adaptive approaches — where a direction is clear but the route to get there needs to be experimented — ‘crossing the river by feeling the stones’ to use an expression from Deng Xioaping, or as Luca from Chôra put it recently: “learning our way to a solution’’.
Designing a portfolio of options implies accepting complexity, identifying possible leverage points within the system which may produce change, and designing shorter term interventions to produce learning and knowledge that feedback into future program design.
This was an idea that appealed to many in the office and we agreed as a first step to make it as practical as possible by applying it to a defined space — namely governance. In Malawi, good governance is a key pillar of the Government’s agenda, as well as the building block to progress on poverty reduction and sustainable development.
While this is still work in progress, our story has so far has seen the following phases:
Defining the problem space
You can’t understand what might be leverage points within the system, without properly understanding the space in which you are operating. At least, this is the logic.
Following the System Transformation Framework developed by Chôra, the Problem Space of Governance started with an effort to identify, articulate and spatially represent parts of the governance system in Malawi and uncovering the forces that may be keeping the system locked in its current state, and understanding better where to act in that system to trigger and sustain good governance.
In Malawi, we identified three system-wide governance effects: accountable institutions, engaged civil society, and effective public service delivery.
Various forms of analysis (our own experience, field work, interviews with a range of stakeholders, desk research) uncovered dynamics between the three effects that helped draw out two aspects of accountability.
● Horizontal (in green lines on the graph) — connecting policy implementation with the system’s ability to hold itself accountable across its functional and social divisions, and unearthing tensions between the center and the periphery.
● Vertical (in yellow line) — where citizen participation forms the structural axis, as a function of the way in which the institutions and mechanisms across the governing system incorporate citizen’s interests and voices into decision making spaces.
With those dynamics in place, our efforts focused on understanding various spaces and levels at which these dynamics take shape. As a citizen, you might be a passive recipient of a service (object), you might actively voice your position (subject), or you might actively contribute to creating a more transparent and engaging space for collaborative decision making (contributor).
If we were to spatially visualize governance in Malawi as a ‘problem space’, then, it may look something like this:
Connecting projects and identifying leverage points
While one might look at this and think it is an interesting conceptual exercise (and you wouldn’t be wrong), the penny dropped at the stage when we began looking at our own portfolio, placing it against this problem space. Without knowing what the projects in the graph below are, you should be able to spot gaps in the portfolio as well as spaces of overlap that are potential points of acceleration by connecting projects more intentionally.
This has helped us do two things:
The first is to start to draw more deliberate links between projects in the portfolio, looking to accelerate their impact on the ground by aggregating them. So, for example, instead of having a gender project aiming to change the behavior of rural-based male heads of household around domestic violence, a climate project supporting them to adapt their farming techniques, and a disaster project appealing to them not to build near the river — all as separate interventions — we are looking at a more coherent approach around behavior change that pulls on capacities across different projects and equally is capable of getting to faster results in all of them.
The second is to identify possible leverage points in the system where we are not currently working, such as supporting greater citizen engagement in policy making and service delivery or developing horizon-scanning and foresight capabilities to better link governance and thematic interventions such as anticipating and adapting to climate change.
The research throughout has been done in an incredibly participatory manner — with the team reaching beyond their knowledge boundaries and comfort zones to usual and unusual partners, deep within Malawi, as well as out to other countries. They have been asking probing questions: who are the possible agents of change? Who is being left out in favour of traditional partners that has not led to the results we had hoped for? Of course, that needs time to be freed up to invest in the intellectual effort, networking and co-creation it implies.
Designing and managing the new portfolio
We’re currently in the process of designing new interventions that are meant to bring diversity and new capabilities to what we already have. The teams have so far come up with a range of project concepts that can be evaluated by key decision makers and chosen to be further elaborated and turned into a portfolio of projects.
Concepts include inclusive climate finance accountability to bring greater citizen engagement in defining priorities for support and tracking in climate finance; a platform for greater citizen interaction with their Parliamentarians; and a public sector innovation model to test and prototype new solutions inside Government.
As we move forward to design which interventions we will focus on, and what our new portfolio might look like, we also inevitably need to continue building our skills. The implications are, of course, that this requires much more dynamic management of a portfolio with an inbuilt capability to learn and modify depending on knowledge that is being generated. So, what might a coherent portfolio of options look like and how will we manage it and what capabilities do we need as a team?
While those are questions still to be answered, what is clear so far is that the ability to abstract and view our portfolio from different angles has helped us expose entry points and gaps that otherwise we would not have been able to see, focused in our daily reality of ‘doing’.
The process has created different conversations and dynamics within the office, socializing the process to a larger team. It also brought a plethora of experiences and perspectives to building a strategy around governance which is a skill set that we are starting to deploy across other portfolios in the office.
At the same time, Sierra Leone’s chief innovation officer, David Sengeh, recently wrote that one possible reason for why institutions have stagnated is the dominance of international experts. Throughout this process, our focus was to embed new capabilities inside our own (UNDP and other) teams with the intent to marry the best of what exists globally (methods and capabilities) with what works locally (tacit and contextual knowledge). This can have implications for the way UNDP and other development (and government) organizations are structured, funded and dominantly act — but if we’re to build systems that can be resilient in the face of shocks like COVID-19, we may argue that this is the only way to make that change happen.
Watch this space…
