Locally grown missions: UNDP’s experience on portfolio approach to system transformation & our emerging questions
by Francine Pickup, deputy director of UNDP’s Bureau for Program & Policy Support; Jennifer Baumwoll, global climate change advisor; Millie Begovic, head of UNDP’s Strategic Innovation Unit
We enjoyed reading Carl Mossfeldt’s piece on Rethinking EU’s City Missions. Our experience across 55 countries on working with partners to design country-based missions validates many of his insights:
- Legitimacy issue: Top-down missions that don’t have traction locally don’t have ‘teeth’ or legitimacy.
- Political issue: Discovering a development pathway around which multiple interests converge is often cast as an administrative, coordination problem but it is in fact, a deeply political process.
- Capability issue: The public sector struggles to articulate these alternative development paths that help converge multiple interests locally and sustain mobilization for action.
In this piece, we’d like to share:
- Insights from system & portfolio efforts in over 50 countries: Our experience, learnings & examples from mission driven work,
- From local missions to global public goods: The challenges we face and lessons we’ve learnt around connecting local missions with global goals, and
- Rethinking the development sector for mission oriented work as the default: A call for action for organizations who want to rethink with us how we do more of the work for which Carl is advocating.
Insights from system & portfolio efforts in over 50 countries
At UNDP, we approached missions & system change from a local level, leveraging portfolios as a vehicle to channel political capital, policy interventions & community action. Our portfolio approach to system transformation is born out of our innovation agenda and a long journey with Denmark. It recognizes that innovation is about responding to seemingly insurmountable, complex challenges by changing systems from the inside. We look at the ecosystem around the issue and seek to develop alternative narratives with a clear direction and a long-term commitment embedded locally rather than by introducing new solutions, gadgets or labs from the outside.
This tends to align not just with Carl’s piece but also a range of emerging research & analysis — from Geoff Mulgan’s efforts on rethinking institutional architecture and Vaughn Tan’s work on operating in uncertainty to OECD’s assessments of development aid effectiveness calling for more cohesive, portfolio approaches embedded locally, earmarked flexibility and governed dynamically for constant adaptation.
Some of this is also emerging from the current evaluation of our strategic innovation efforts conducted by Transition Collective director, Christian Bason. Our partners have reported three main findings:
Learning #1: Reframing & recombining finance for more impact: System & portfolio approaches generate new understandings of development issues, help reframe policy problems & move beyond sector-based interventions to identifying entry points for transformation. This positions portfolios as a vehicle for co-locating investments that were previously fragmented interventions — leading to more efficiencies, combining existing & crowding in new finances. However, the dominant practice of earmarking & fragmenting development funds remains an obstacle to this work.
Recasting depopulation in places like Serbia and Thailand, for example, from a demographic to well-being & aging issue opens up multiple entry points for action — from rethinking city-life for different age groups & drivers of longevity to immigration policies. In other contexts, changing the lens on borderland areas across Africa from one of deprivation towards opportunity generates more possibilities — building micro-energy solutions that drive economic activity, helping communities safely navigate border crossing to leveraging mobile phones to bridge public service gaps on land disputes and education for youth.
Learning #2: Crossing organizational boundaries for transformation: Coalitions that form around missions tend to pivot from basic coordination (exchange of information) toward more cohesive action & collaboration, such as sharing resources & making joint decisions. This can lead to both programmatic & financial coherence where individual interventions are better aligned with societal needs. The key challenge is maintaining collaboration across different constituents & organizations for a long term objective in the face of political cycles, unpredictable & short term development finance and staff turn-over (the IIPP is distilling insights on this point across their work in cities).
“The Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Relations of Bosnia and Herzegovina is committed to leading the multi-stakeholder exchange and facilitating whole-of government coordination for the green transition, not only to ensure more effective policies and strategies but also to step up efforts towards their actual implementation. The launch of the Green Transition Multi -Stakeholders Engagement Platform is a much-needed partnership mechanism that brings together all relevant stakeholders, existing knowledge, and ideas for the green transition and ensures a collective voice to the policy efforts.”
by Stasa Kosarac, Minister of Foreign Trade and Economic Relations of Bosnia and Herzegovina
Our experience from working with city authorities — from La Paz and Montevideo to Mykolaiv, Batumi and Pasig — shows that portfolio approaches for system transformation offer a more dynamic & locally grounded way for designing local strategies. Unpacking the identity question, “”what do we want our city to be?”, creates genuine spaces for engagement and results in more sustained efforts across different constituents. Citizens of Kutaisi, Georgia want to live in an Eco Smart City — this led to the generation of a series of connected interventions that span mobility solutions, waste reuse and recycling and a standing platform that coalesces locally-driven initiatives towards a city-based mission.
Learning #3: The value of portfolio approaches is dynamic management — the continued generation of new policy choices for decision makers to tackle shifting contexts. Portfolio dynamic management can generate a flow of new policy possibilities that can prevent lock-ins to single courses and build decision makers’ agency in the face of change. The ability of different organizations to turn those possibilities into effective action often grinds at internal processes (eg. procurement, human resources, etc) that are misaligned with the emergent nature of development issues.
From local missions to global public goods — lessons from Climate Promise
Mindful of the learnings from our country driven mission work, the question for an international organization such as ours with a global and national level presence in 170 countries, is how do we work according to a mission logic at a global (or regional) level and at a country level at the same time? Getting a man on the moon may not be the best example, but how we reduce global temperature rise from 3.5 degrees to 1.5 degrees may offer some clues.
Climate change is one field where the incoherence between institutional responses and the actual manifestation of a policy issue (runaway CO2 emissions) clearly shows the existential need for systemic, ambitious approaches based on a rethink of how collective action is organized
The Paris Agreement introduced a new mechanism to address this connection between the global policy goals (i.e. reducing global greenhouse gasses) and the manifestation of these policy goals at the national level in a form of connected policy interventions. The vehicle for this are the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) — a unique instrument where countries self define their commitments to the global goal, based on their own national priorities, circumstances and needs.
UNDP designed Climate Promise as an effort to support member states to do this — it worked with 128 governments ahead of the COP26 in Glasgow to revise their NDC targets. This process led to raising an ambition by 91% in mitigation and 93% in adaptation efforts, with all NDCs featuring higher quality and more inclusion. As a result, when taken together, the second round of NDCs cumulatively added up to ~2.5 degrees threshold — a difference of ~1 degree from the original set of NDCs put forward in 2015.
Looking ahead, the mission now is two fold: i) translate national pledges into a mix of policy interventions to support countries to pursue their goals, and ii) up the ambition ahead of COP30. support countries to once again ratchet up ambition as part of the upcoming revision cycle by 2025 ahead of COP30.
The aim is to collectively set the world on a path to keep warming below 1.5 degrees. This includes integrating multiple issues including energy transition, protection of nature, investment in women, agriculture, cities but also building countervailing narratives and investing into new models of value creation — context specific and providing development pathways that have traction locally, create new possibilities and mobilize diverse constituents around the shared goal. To Carl’s point, this must be led by country level governments with their local constituencies, including private sector and civil society, where these various work streams and issues come together and speak to local realities, needs and opportunities.
The distinct characteristic of the Climate Promise is the infrastructure it built to connect the dots both vertically and horizontally. It allows for a plug and play of many different constituents toward a shared goal. It also offers a foundation for scaled up efforts across the UN system to support countries in achieving the Paris Agreement, particularly on the road to 2025. It is this infrastructure that is helping us transform UNDP’s effort from a collection of small adhoc country level interventions into a force for global change.
The two ingredients facilitated the interconnection between local and global levels. One is the Paris Agreement structure, underpinned by the country-owned and context-specific instrument of an NDC. With the strong political momentum behind climate change and the Paris Agreement globally, this elevated the role of the NDC at the national level and brought high-visibility and political focus to the work. UNDP mirrored this mechanism via the Climate Promise.
The second ingredient is the investment in the ‘functional’ work beyond the technical thematic work. Focusing on cross-cutting issues such as data, analysis and knowledge, communications, global engagement and operations helped to integrate the portfolio both vertically as well as horizontally across teams and thematic workstreams. For example, establishing global data dashboards that analyzed the national reality allowed to both track day-to-day progress in-country against specific priorities and needs, while also capturing regional or global level trends. This then created a feedback loop where the trends further informed the national actions, which further reinforced global shifts. Another example is communications, often seen as an afterthought to bring visibility, the Climate Promise instead leveraged communications expertise to tell stories that spun the thread between local impact and the global political.
Nonetheless, this approach is much easier said than done. In establishing this infrastructure we faced many hurdles that come from a ‘project centric’ model we had to work with. At the same time, the need to respond to specific donor requirements often limited flexibility and adaptability throughout implementation. The project-driven need to show short term results has not always aligned with the long term nature of the change we are looking to affect. As a result, many process-oriented milestones are often captured, which do not always tell the full story or impact of the engagement.
For example, while the Paris Agreement offers a clear set of global goals, its translation at the national level is not as simple and clear. Delivering on a national renewable energy target requires not just establishing the energy infrastructure, but also interventions on institutional coordination, policy alignment and trust, consideration of population dynamics and inequality, strengthening of livelihoods and transitioning jobs. It also impacts a range of other outcomes and systems — from health to education to food to gender — many of which are unpredictable and only emerge over time. Recognizing these interconnections, constant change in context and circumstances, and related timeframes necessary for results to take shape is something we need to acknowledge and govern for.
Rethinking the development sector for mission oriented work as the default
Our hunch is that a portfolio approach is the only way to achieve change at the scale & speed we need by activating efforts at both local and global level simultaneously and evolving a 21st century architecture for global public goods that can help break the gridlock highlighted in UNDP’s 2023/24 Human Development Report.
Our experience points to a need to consider these multiple country efforts in their totality, rapidly identifying patterns that inform our collective understanding, breaking barriers to collaboration and continually generating new interventions that can break the gridlock to create new public goods.
Working this way goes against the prevalent modus operandi of the development sector that continues to be informed by a projectized logic. For this new approach to take root, it needs to be mainstreamed into the plumbing of the development sector’s core business rather than located in the innovation agenda alone.
At UNDP, we set up an inter-organizational team, the Portfolio Acceleration Committee, to roll-out our new portfolio policy, which sits alongside the policy on projects. This roll-out includes our Office for Human Resources developing portfolio competencies in staffing profiles and various forms of experiential training is underway to sensitize partners and staff. It also involves developing a clear language in the organization about system & portfolio work that everyone uses when talking to partners. Our RBM teams have worked in a sandbox with Gates Foundation to understand how we design, monitor and report on results. We are also thinking about how to leverage funding and finance for more transformative results in development. These efforts are still work in progress but we are interested in partnering with others because ultimately, we want to build a future-oriented organization fit to support societies as they transform to address the problems of today and tomorrow.
Taking a page out of Demos Helsinki’s book, we need to address the ‘tragedy of the form’ — the acknowledgment that we can’t transform societies today by using forms of collective action built in the industrial age. This is a call for rethinking the operating system of development work — from how we finance for system transformation and understand intermediate change as we pursue long term objectives through M&E and learning, to how we rethink procurement and talent development for constantly shifting context.
