Transforming UNDP’s Governance approach in Malawi through a Portfolio Approach
By Agnes Mary Chimbiri and Maria Sichone (UNDP Malawi)
Last year, our team in Malawi applied the UNDP Portfolio Acceleration & Sensemaking Protocol in partnership with Chôra Foundation on the Malawi CO Governance Portfolio to understand the fit (or more aptly ‘coherence’) between what we currently do and the critical issues the country is facing. On the basis of this Portfolio Sensemaking we articulated three system wide effects that we want to work toward (accountable institutions, engaged civil society and effective public service delivery) and identified dynamics in the society that are currently keeping the system in place. Through making sense of our activities, experience and projects in the Governance space of Malawi we generated intelligence on core factors that are affecting governance in the country and identified 6 structured areas of interventions: External Factors and Conditions; Citizen’s needs; Behavior Change; Inclusive evidence-based programming; Building robust service eco-system; and capabilities and resources.
System Wide Effects
Applying the UNDP Portfolio Sensemaking Protocol on our Governance Portfolio allowed us to do three things. One, our team reached a common understanding of key elements of the governance in Malawi, as a space where a human system establishes a direction and control over the entire country and in that way ensures internal coherence and contributes to resilience and transformation of the whole system. Two and related, it then surfaced connections between the projects as a coherent Portfolio of governance interventions:
What were previously separate interventions — a gender project changing 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 — now became the basis of a coherent approach to Governance. Three, it allowed us to see spaces and leverage points that we were not working in or engaging with such as leveraging citizen networks as active participants in providing services (as opposed to passive recipients) or building a new muscle in the public sector around future and foresight. In other words, the sensemaking process put us in the position to shape our portfolio intentionally and in line with the challenges that the country is facing. This post is about that process- portfolio design process meant to transform the governance space in Malawi.
Portfolio Design — Good Governance in Malawi
So how did we move from sensemaking to developing portfolios?
First, we agreed on three core principles and a logic that underpins the new portfolio. To accelerate the impact of UNDP Governance Portfolio work in the country, the portfolio should embrace the following principles:
- go where internal collaboration and coordination among people, functions and divisions of government can be strengthened and developed to enhance the policy-making effectiveness of the Executive, and increase its service delivery capability.
- go where a governing system interacts with and is structured by the interests of the citizen, to contribute to Governance dynamics and effects by strengthening the social contract and the accountability that connects and bonds political representatives with their constituencies, the people of Malawi.
- go where increasing system resilience and inducing greater trust in Government and public institutions is the effect of a capability of the Malawi Governance System to look out and generate foresight and actionable policies and interventions that establish its relevance to its own citizens with respect to climate change dynamics, adaptation to its implications and mitigation of its effects.
Second, through a mix of horizon scanning, research and a collaborative Portfolio Design Process with a range of partners comprised of select Government Ministries, Departments and Agents (MDAs), the executive branch of the Government-Office of the President and Cabinet (OPC), Development Partners, NGOs and the Academia, we identified places in the Governance space where we would have an impact and this translated into three new portfolio interventions.
The first one was built on the arguments and design considerations developed during the intelligence creation process, where we found that Horizontal Collaboration is the representation of the Governance Space that involves the interaction of social inclusion and policy implementation to create a Governance system’s capability to hold itself accountable across its functional and social divisions. This position took us where internal collaboration and coordination among people, functions and divisions of government can be strengthened and developed to enhance the policy-making effectiveness of the Executive and increase its service delivery capability. We were convinced that Horizontal Accountability Position would interrupt the current “silo dynamics” within UNDP through creating processes, protocols and spaces of interaction, communication and learning. This means that the existing projects and new project designs related to public policy and service delivery would have to be re-conceptualized through the lens of this position. Drawing on this position, the Governance Portfolio is conceptualizing with Government and partners, a Program on Public Sector Innovation.
In the second one, we determined that Vertical Accountability represents the relationship between the government and its constituency. The dynamics of participation and representation come together and determine how the governing system holds itself accountable to their constituency and how that constituency, in turn, holds its representatives accountable. We came to understand that citizen participation is the structural axis of the Governance Space that constitutes the Vertical dimension of Accountability together with Social Inclusion and Policy Implementation. We learnt that Vertical Accountability position ensures that governing system incorporates citizens’ needs and voices into decision-making spaces. It demands a minimum of citizen agency and voice. This understanding created an opportunity for reconfiguration of UN(DP) support to participatory governance that currently is fragmented. As a result, with the Parliament, we developed a project design idea on “Bwalo Lathu” [Our Platform] that brings coherence in the Governance portfolio through a sustained and rich process of citizen participation bridging the formal and Informal spheres and creating new dynamics of interaction and information exchange from the citizens to Parliament as a Governance oversight platform.
For the third one, we focused on exploring the Lateral Accountability position- where strengthened and transformative capability of the Governance System increases system resilience and induces greater trust in Government and public institutions including the UN(DP). This position generates foresight and actionable policies and interventions that establish its relevance to its own citizens with respect to climate change dynamics, adaptation to its implications and mitigation of its effects. Based on this position, we jointly developed a project design idea on Foresight that will build capabilities of UN(DP), National Planning Commission and Economic Planning Department of Government to generate actionable development and institutional policies and interventions.
Personal reflections — what is our experience and vision moving forward?
We have worked on this process of portfolio sensemaking and design for about 18 months. This period was marked with uncertainty (about the new craft and capabilities that we haven’t tried before), anxiety (the need to balance a day to day delivery and management of urgent tasks, with a call to engage in a heavy intellectual exercise together with the various partners such as NGOs in the governance space as well as Government Ministries, Departments and Agents, to apply a different lens to the understanding of the governance space in order to see many more opportunities to work in it), and flashes of excitement and a sense of accomplishment (the a-ha moments where we saw connections across the work in the portfolio that brought us closer, and the opportunity in building new interventions with the government). Three particular lessons stick out for us:
● Sensemaking is not a one off, it is a new way to manage the portfolio. If we take as the truth that the world outside UNDP changes all the time and far faster than our current methods of project management do, then this raises a question of how we can match the speed of changes on the outside with a muscle that helps us ‘see’ those changes, ‘understand’ them and craft responses to them. Sensemaking is the way to do just that- dynamic management of the portfolio that ensures that what we have in it is coherent with those changes on the outside. It is also a way to do a participative, social strategy design because the prioritization is driven by intelligence generation that the entire team participates in (as opposed to being led by a small group of colleagues in the office). The process become the tool for negotiating space for a coherent Governance portfolio within the UN(DP) and Government spaces. The new project designs will become the model for coherent Governance Program that would integrate various actors, institutions and projects/programs with a common goal.
● Don’t underestimate the Government’s appetite for transformation. We were extremely hesitant about pitching some of the new positions to our counterparts (eg. the foresight unit and innovation in the public sector). Our initial hunch was that the Government might dismiss it given the scale and scope of issues it is working on. The actual experience was the exact opposite. It is precisely because the challenges are vast, unpredictable and difficult to crack that the Government was open for new ideas that are based on an articulation of a strategic portfolio intent and solid research and field work we’ve done. In the next phase, Government counterparts will be exposed to the sense-making protocol as a learning-by-doing mechanism for institutional accountability and effective service delivery. We think this may open new possibilities to rethink how we dynamically manage for example Country Program Documents — the most strategic engagement with the Government over the transformation agenda.
● Integrating the old with the new. UNDP Malawi has already had a strong portfolio, team and relationships. In the coming months, our efforts will be focused on integrating the new positions with the existing portfolio in order to accelerate changes on the ground. We have more questions than answers at this point. Will the dynamic management of the portfolio break the existing silos? Will it lead to a more seamless collaboration across the teams, that are currently driven by individual project documents? Will it allow us to ‘see’ the linkages and underlying drivers that usually remain invisible when Governance is viewed through a lens of a single project?
We’re excited about what is coming next. We will keep blogging in order to process what we’re learning and share our experience in case you wish to collaborate with us!
