Setting Up For Success
Transformative change needs a distinct culture-funding-people model.
By Veena Srinivasan
The Centre for Social and Environmental Innovation (CSEI) was started at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE) in 2019 to better fulfil its vision. CSEI’s mission was to extend state-of-the-art sustainability science research into practice.
Over the last two years, we have realised that achieving this requires building organisations that can align knowledge and practice. This proved harder than we expected. There were specific challenges we needed to navigate for CSEI to become successful.
Aligning people and culture
Knowledge institutions are about people. Creating a transdisciplinary institution meant that we had to get people with different career growth paths and skills to work together. One way we have done this at CSEI is by setting defined ‘Objectives and Key Results’ both at the individual and initiative levels to align individuals to organisational impact targets.
Reconciling push and pull
Research institutions often view their pathway to impact through a ‘push’ approach, feeding the research results to the outside world as and when it becomes available. The problem is, what really results in change is a ‘pull’ approach, responding to the needs of governments, businesses and citizens with research synthesis that is well-communicated and positioned for use. CSEI plays a critical mediation role in reconciling the ‘push’ and ‘pull’ approaches — working with deep experts on one hand and societal actors on the other.
Read | CSEI and the Sustainable Development Goals
Moving from linear to iterative approaches
People often assume that research translates to practice through a linear process — research is done to ‘settle the science’, and then solutions are devised and implemented. But for many sustainability problems, the science is never completely settled. Instead, a more realistic model is an adaptive approach — by going back and forth between research and implementation. To make this happen, CSEI has had to actively invest in becoming a ‘learning organisation’.
Fostering multi-institutional partnerships
For successful transformation of ‘socio-techno-ecological systems’, we need different types of research — business modelling, political ecology, institutional economics, behavioural sciences, cultural anthropology, engineering, market research, ecological and agricultural research. This necessitates multi-institutional research partnerships as well as partnerships between researchers and practitioners. This has required CSEI to create new models of funding and collaboration and invest significantly in ‘community building’.
Read | Our Vision for Jaltol
One of our main learnings over the last two years has been that enabling transformative change needs a distinct institutional culture, funding and people model. To make this happen, we will be incorporating CSEI as a Section 8 company soon. CSEI remains closely connected to ATREE, part of the ‘ATREE group of institutions’. But becoming a company allows us to grow by exploring and building new partnerships while remaining anchored to the culture of deep knowledge and expertise that ATREE provides.
To join our team, head over to the careers page: https://www.csei.org/careers
