How to nurture strategic partnerships to transform systems?
We’ve been exploring portfolios at UNDP over the last few years not just as an instrument to bring more efficiencies to our innovation work (left side of the continuum below) but as a learning & discovery vehicle that helps us better deal with policy problems that are not well defined, change quickly & bring about unforeseen results.
UNDP’s Strategic Plan’s call for adoption system & portfolio approaches is translated to action in more than 50 countries globally who are evolving our own understanding of how to reconcile an emerging, horizontal way of working in a sector that continues to be driven by assumptions of predictability.
*Visual taken from ‘Taking Pulse on the Emerging Portfolio Practice’
We learned that used in this way, portfolios bring a very different lens to what is a policy or program response to an issue (eg, waste is not an environmental problem but a result of a set of economic, social & political drivers that result in & compound the issue of waste) but they also fundamentally challenge the way we operate — the ‘how’ of development. One part of this ‘how’ relates to the way we partner with & crowd in resources, expertise & political capital of a diverse set of players that often, while declaring a commitment to a common goal (eg. circular transition) operate in very narrow siloes.
This is where my recent role with the global strategic innovation unit comes in — what are different ways in which we can forge partnerships with diverse players, aligning their comparative advantage toward a transformative goal while recognizing the myriad of restrictions & rigidities that each organization imposes on itself?
In short — how do we partner better and make the development finance go further?
I have worked with different teams trying to crack this question and I wanted to take stock of what we’re learning. Whether that’s rethinking tourism model in Egypt or energy transition in Moldova, creating conditions for young people & women to thrive in Tanzania & Ethiopia, or stewarding circular transitions in BiH — questions our teams grapple are similar:
· Understanding hidden dynamics of a policy issue opens more possibilities to deal with it but it also calls for bringing together partners that should but don’t necessarily work in an integrated way with one another. Sometimes the understanding of how things change differs greatly — do we invest in technology for jobs or tackle decades long discrimination in the workplace to unblock human potential? The answer is rarely either/or but alignment of actions can vary greatly depending on how you look at the issue.
· Financial planning cycles, conditions for investing, appetite of risk and compliance & audit systems vary greatly between different players (donor governments, private sector, foundations, startups) & often act as a barrier for more genuine collaboration.
· How we talk about issues & language matters — sometimes new things come with new language that may be off putting or abstract, turning off partners from working together.
Strategic partnerships could bring a powerful proposition to the notion of integrated action and accelerated impact. But this means reshaping the dynamics of partners’ relations from being transactional, donor-recipient, and only measured by compliance to a more collaborative and learning based model, which elevates accountability. Here are a few things that are emerging from this work:
1 Portfolios trigger a more powerful way of combining development finance
We find that policy coherence helps combine available finance in more transformative ways — proving Charles Leadbeater’s maxim that coherence equals leverage. In Tanzania we found many partners investing in youth — some in job for young women, others for youth in rural areas and youth in cities. Driven by organizational imperatives and deadlines, we found that there is little space for them to jointly reflect on andlearn how these different interventions come together. What are the common patterns that emerge across these different contexts for young people that we can address more meaningfully together (wider social networks turn out to be critical across the board for example so how can we be more intentional in helping build those whether they are for youth in cities or rural areas). Think of these current interventions as vertical or horizontal lines of actions, while the complexity of the challenge is more of a web. So, we can directly invest in the capacity of youth in the city or rural areas for example, but if we didn’t respond to issues of mobility, mindset, informality, progress on youth empowerment will be stuck. Portfolio approach helps us define those underlying issue, design for it, and manage it differently to sustain integrated action.
We find that the differences between partners’ logic for investing in some areas vs. others reveal differences of perspectives not just on how change happens (which is healthy) but about organizational priorities that sometimes may have little to do with the nature of the actual problem in a country. Investing time (and a lot of time) to build shared understanding of the existing dynamics & ways to tackle them is a starting position to bring that coherence & starts revealing to the whole system of partners more powerful ways in which finance can be combined in more transformative ways & crowd in new investments from elsewhere. So while portfolio does help drive different decisions about where & how to invest, financial coherence is easier said than done as it calls for sustained effort to build shared understanding & alignment among partners as well as tackle strings attached to individual organization’s finance.
2 Portfolios help bring economies of scale, make the development finance go further, and allow us to reshape the demand
Rethinking tourism model in Egypt opened up new pathways to reimagining the fundamentals of the country’s development model — through for example prioritizing local jobs that support new & distinct local tourism offer or looking at resource efficiency as a competitive factor for tourism industry (in the process resource intensity of the economy). This highlights the centrality of sustainable tourism to local development, green transition, MSME support, poverty alleviation, among others. Accordingly, a sustainable tourism portfolio helps us build on a set of assets we currently have that should speak more to one another and further expand a pipeline of policy options that can inform decisions.
Viewed from this perspective, possibilities are much greater if we’re able to take some liberties & recast the existing funds. What I mean by that is that a donor who doesn’t have tourism as a priority but a focus on energy transition & migration, might be turned off by our focus on a single sector. But if energy funds are invested in renewables in tourism SMEs & hotels & migration pot geared toward local jobs for diversified offer — everyone wins. Tourism sector is more competitive, local jobs keep young people pursuing new opportunities in Egypt. This reshaping of demand doesn’t happen by default but requires partnership building & trust. Integrating such cross-cutting investments with accountability on learning and coherence doesn’t only safeguard against fragmentation of investments, but it helps bring economies of scale, making the development finance go further.
3 Making portfolios ‘real’ opens new conversations & helps reveal hidden dynamics & opportunities
What might a carton of milk tell us about trust or mobile phone bill about agency of young people? We’ve been inspired by Kristin Alford’s work on using everyday products to tease out indirectly insights from communities about difficult and often sensitive topics. In some cases, this has translated in turning portfolios into physical objects that people can touch & step into in hope of creating a different type of engagement with the issue — see my colleague Simone’s post about these experiences.
In bringing diverse group of partners interested to invest in our portfolios, we borrowed from Dr Alford’s work to create an immersive experience that can:
→ Reflect the new way of approaching complex challenges and doing development
→ Emphasize mutual accountability, co-investment, and co-creation versus the traditional transactional relationship of presenting solutions.
→ Provide a memorable engagement that opens the space for future collaboration and follow-ups between different stakeholders.
In Tanzania for example we used a smart phone as a conversation starter to probe relationships between youth empowerment and social interaction, access to basic services, future of work, agency, and mobility.
Stepping into the symbolic notion of a smart phone allowed the audience to ask multidirectional questions like, “WHY does it matter for young people to own a smartphone?”, “WHAT role is youth playing in the technology value chain? “, “HOW does social interaction (in the social media era) affect young people’s identities and behavior?”.
By doing so, it was easier to surface different kinds of connections in ONE conversation to help develop relevance and integration between different people in the room instead of having them over a coarse of separate discussions with separate stakeholders creating silos and moving away from systems. Those questions helped to see that for youth today, agency and participation is a prerequisite of empowerment, that we can’t support access to job market without designing for readiness to future of work, and that culture plays a significant role in shaping identity, mindset and possibly skills of young people in Tanzania, and more importantly, how all feed into each other. This means, donors and partners investing in governance, digital transformation, social cohesion, etc., have a strong and interdependent stake in youth empowerment and are a seed for a powerful alliance to invest collectively in an ambition youth portfolio.
One of the key partners shared that they usually don’t get a chance like this to co-create with partners, it was valuable to engage in the process way before asks for financial support.
In Egypt, we used an AI generated imaginations of portfolio options to allow participants to literally step into the spaces where interventions on energy, local development and biodiversity intersect. This helped create new opportunities for developing local assets that currently don’t represent the mainstream of Egypt’s tourism offer and potential for marketing them in new places.
We intentionally used the raw interpretation of the “machine” to the designed portfolio options so the contrast OR similarity with human interpretation would trigger rich reflections, and that’s what exactly happened. One option was about person-to-person exchange for safety and image projection and was represented by an image of a local citizen in a historic area. On sight, one of the partners immediately started questioning why would this mean a physical exchange while we can benefit from the numerous virtual nomads and travelers mega-groups, but then, what would this mean when we bring sustainable tourism in crosslines with digitalization, big data, data privacy and security. Another option about shared tourism direction and coordinated governance was reflected in a 3D country map dominated by dessert lands and urban concentrations. As some of the participants observed this image, a conversation emerged on how sustainable tourism means sustainable Egypt, meaning, we might need to heavily invest in green transition, rural development, sustainable transportation to be able to shift into a more diverse and locally driven tourism offer.
We had partners commenting that they were surprised how the room setup and the artifacts influenced perception on the challenge, the potential solutions, the collaboration flows and how to rethink their role within the portfolio.
Bringing programmatic and financial but also mindset alignment among a diverse set of partners is a long-term proposition that is ultimately about trust building. We’re learning how some of these different tactics can help in holding a space where complexity of development problems is acknowledged and triggers more genuine conversations about how change happens without reducing our actions to a set of silver bullet and short-term solutions.
