Madagascar and UN Global Pulse: If you want to move forward, you can’t only look back
Written by Kitty McKinsey
Lessons learnt in using new tools of strategic foresight & systems thinking to transform planning & sustainable development in Madagascar.
The Indian Ocean island state of Madagascar is well known for pristine beaches, incomparable natural beauty and the wide-eyed, tree-hugging lemurs found nowhere else on Earth. But it is also one of the world’s poorest countries, stagnating in its efforts to improve living conditions and create opportunities for social and economic development.
To strengthen peace, build prosperity and protect the environment for all Malagasy people, both the government and the UN are working on ways to get back on track to achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by the target year of 2030.
“COVID made obvious the pitfalls of simply reacting to events,” says Fabio Losa, economist for the UN Resident Coordinator Office (RCO) in Madagascar. In a country frequently exposed to shocks like cyclones, drought, floods, and locust invasions, “we need to strengthen the resilience of people and institutions through preparation, prevention and anticipation of future events.”
UN Madagascar found support from UN Global Pulse, the Secretary-General’s Innovation Lab and other UN partners in using new tools of strategic foresight and systems thinking to transform planning and sustainable development programs. Lessons learnt could benefit many UN development teams around the world.
In Madagascar, as in most places and most organizations, planning for the future has usually been based on data from the past. But can you really drive forward if you’re only looking in the rear-view mirror?
What if, Losa thought, UN agencies and government ministries put more effort into imagining various potential scenarios — and then worked together to steer development towards the desired future? The experienced Swiss labour economist arrived in the capital, Antananarivo, in 2020, but had already been using strategic foresight tools to explore the future of work.
When Losa came on the scene, the UN development system was working towards a new UN Sustainable Development Cooperation Framework for 2024–2028 to help Madagascar make progress on the 17 SDGs and its own priorities.
One of the steps in preparing the cooperation framework was for the UN to do a Common Country Analysis (CCA), an impartial look at Madagascar’s challenges and needs over the next few years. This important document is the foundation for the UN contribution and directs how resources will be spent on sustainable development in the country.
This is where Losa felt “we needed to go beyond business as usual to have a more forward-looking analysis; a CCA that underpins a more agile and future-oriented new cooperation framework.”
In addition to his experience in Switzerland, Losa knew Global Pulse’s expertise in strategic foresight because he had participated in its Foresight for Systems Change training. He understood that with this approach, “risks and opportunities become less strange and unexpected things.”
Strategic foresight, with its own specialist team within Global Pulse, is a collaborative process that moves away from reliance on history and systematically explores possible futures to anticipate emerging and uncertain developments. It endeavors to make long-term thinking central to the UN way of doing business and allows teams to prepare for and influence the course of change.
“I could see we needed to improve the way we analyze issues, to do both a systems analysis and a foresight analysis,” says Issa Sanogo, who arrived in 2020 as the new Resident Coordinator in Madagascar. “We needed to better take into account the way Madagascar’s national priorities and the SDGs are related.”
From Global Pulse’s point of view, the UN team in Madagascar was a champion of the new approach, which is a central plank in UN transformation.
“Madagascar has a very dynamic team, and we are trying to connect with pioneers and change-makers throughout the UN system to see how we can empower them,” says Tiina Neuvonen, Strategic Foresight Lead for Global Pulse, based in Helsinki.
With the enthusiasm of a newcomer, Losa set about converting other members of the UN team. They quickly understood how valuable a proactive approach could be in an island state exposed to so many uncontrollable events.
In an impressive display of unity, the UN’s eight largest agencies all signed on to fund the foresight exercise. The whole UN system took part in a series of workshops from August to the end of October 2022 that produced the CCA unveiled in January this year.
“Using strategic foresight and system analysis for the CCA and ultimately for our cooperation framework with Madagascar helped us provide valuable evidence-based strategic and policy support to the Government,” says Sanogo.
The workshops were held in country — bringing together UN agencies, government ministries, civil society, academics and business people — with remote support from the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) and the UN’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA).
In addition to Strategic Foresight, the workshops introduced UN staff to a completely new way of planning: systems analysis, a holistic way to investigate factors and interactions that could contribute to a possible outcome. It’s a departure from the linear way UN planning is normally done, where one activity is expected to contribute to one specific outcome, with little regard for linkages to other activities within the same agency, never mind with outside actors.
Systems thinking, brought to life by systems maps and causal loop diagrams, enhances strategic thinking and policy coherence among UN agencies, government bodies and other players by shifting their focus from their own priorities alone and offering insight into the bigger system they operate in.
It helps break down the much-lamented UN silos and provokes thought about the unintended consequences of well-intentioned actions by clearly showing consequences and the factors that reinforce or counter-balance desired results, and how policy interventions could change outcomes.
“Any change in one area has an impact on a lot of other issues,” says Véronique Verbruggen, Interregional Advisor on Governance and Institution Building at DESA. “This approach encourages a move from sector-based policymaking to issues-based policymaking.”
And, she adds, vivid diagrams “better show that nobody can make a change on their own.”
UNDESA and UNITAR have been partners on systems thinking in several countries; UNITAR took the lead on the Madagascar project.
UNITAR’s Elena Proden, who has helped many UNCTs through the process, says “each time we show it to UN Country Teams, they are completely amazed. People like it because we never do it this way and it’s easy to understand.”
The end result, which helps policymakers understand what would happen throughout the system if one variable changes, may look very clear, even obvious, on paper. But, Proden says, getting there was far from easy.
The first challenge during discussions was helping people break out of their old way of thinking: to listen and try to understand the overall context, rather than promote their own agenda. Even if UN staffers are committed to UN reform, Proden says, “the classical theory of change does not use systems thinking.”
Lots of dialogue was needed to make sure teams did not overlook something important, to examine both qualitative — the why and the how — and quantitative — the data — benchmarks.
Using strategic foresight and systems thinking resulted in more coherence in planning, better inter-agency cooperation and convergence of efforts, something the Madagascar team recommends to other UNCTs.
“Both analytical works require not only a strong commitment at RCO level to drive the process, but also a strong multi-stakeholder consultative process with a strong involvement of the government,” Sanogo says.
In Madagascar, the UNCT now is trying to extend the life of the methodologies and process by improving training for both the UN and national planners, and helping the government make strategic foresight part of its own government structure and processes.
“We really want to make sure this is not a one-shot exercise,” says Losa.
Lessons Learnt — Advice for UN Country Teams
- Train participants on methodologies ahead of time; this is essential for success.
- In advance, consult as many groups as possible — young people, the elderly, handicapped — throughout the country.
- Conduct consultations in local languages to involve as many people as possible.
- Buy-in from stakeholders ahead of time is critical.
- Once stakeholders fully understand the value of new kinds of hard evidence, UNCTs can make fast progress.
- If at all possible, in-person workshops are more effective than video meetings or hybrid sessions.
- Support from key government counterparts is vital.
- Keep the momentum going; embed these approaches in institutions.
Discover more about this and other foresight projects on UN Global Pulse Strategic Foresight.