Anticipatory Governance and Refugee Protection
By Aarathi Krishnan (Strategic Foresight Advisor) and Monica Sandri (Representative, UNHCR North Macedonia)
“A high-resilience system encourages foresight, shares the burden of managing risk, encourages innovation and cooperation, and is resistant to disruptive actors that aim to undermine the basis for cooperation. In contrast, a low-resilience system is absorbed by firefighting the most immediate crisis, places the burden of risks on actors who are least equipped to manage them, and is prone to increasing polarisation and conflict. A strategy for resilience builds a commitment to collective action that delivers lasting benefits, while stimulating the will to co-operate. This does not simply happen. It requires effective leadership, broad participation, an investment in building alliances and networks, and clear communication of problems, solutions, and successes.” (Alex Evans and David Stevens, May 2020).
2020 has made clear that the current century is a century of complexity, uncertainty, and rapid change. This changing operational context requires new ways of envisioning, strategizing and experimenting in institutions and governments to ensure wellbeing for all. For organizations such as UNHCR to continue to be able to deliver on its mandate in these complex futures, requires an evolution in strategic approaches.
But how exactly does a bureaucratic organization shift from traditional, tried and true approaches to strategy development to ones that are innovative, anticipatory and fit for the future? We start with a hypothesis and an experiment in anticipatory governance. Anticipatory governance is a process that embeds foresight into the creation and implementation of strategy. Embracing anticipatory governance allows institutions to sense and execute changes further into the future, to blunt the impacts of threats, and to amplify and harvest opportunities.
In this vein, UNHCR in North Macedonia, in partnership with the UNHCR Innovation Service, embarked on a journey in 2020: A journey to reimagine what change and greater impact could look like through an anticipatory governance process; a journey to reimagine what the Country Office of the Future might be, when positioned within this ambition of change; a journey to embrace a participatory cultural change that could reframe the field as the new centre, shifting structures to a highly networked, interconnected model as a provocative response to the normal approaches of bureaucratic decision-making.
The experiment in anticipatory governance in North Macedonia has been multi-faceted. Achieving the overall ambition of localising global change required us to embark on a process that was both internal to the organisation, and external. To embed the change internally, we introduced foresight capabilities in the UNHCR country office, but also linked it systematically to the design of a new future-oriented UNHCR country strategy. To foster the change externally, we worked with the broader UN system in the country to embed these approaches in the UN-wide country cooperation framework. In addition, we recognised that co-designing futures requires the vision and ambitions of civil society. Thus, our external work also focused on inclusive national visioning of what the futures could be in North Macedonia.
To achieve the kind of transformation we sought, we needed to start at the country level. We needed to enable UNHCR colleagues to lead the change, and not merely rely on external consultants. We needed a little bit of bravery and creativity. The last point became poignantly true, as one month into our journey, COVID-19 threw all our careful plans out the window.
So what did we do so far in 2020?
1- Building internal and external foresight capabilities
Foresight can only be truly embedded within institutions if resources, capabilities and systems are genuinely built within organizations. A reliance on external expertise makes it difficult to build locally-led and contextualised approaches. Recognizing this, one of the first things we did was to set up a core team of foresight champions within the UNHCR North Macedonia Country Office. This core team was made up of existing staff that were curious and interested in foresight and innovation, and keen to try something new. The core team became fundamental to our journey, as they led the horizon scanning, and participatory workshops and brought together multiple teams within the Country Office together.
We expanded this core team within UNHCR to build the first UN Cross-Agency Foresight Network in the country — made up of staff from multiple UN agencies interested in foresight, to jointly build anticipatory capacities together in-country.
2- Designing a futures-focused country strategy
Foresight initiatives can be a brilliant generator of new ideas, but to ensure the practice lands in change, requires a systemic link to strategy and action. The UNHCR North Macedonia Country Protection and Solutions Strategy 2030 utilised foresight as the key design mechanism. We worked with the newly formed internal foresight champions to lead a participatory foresight process to design a new vision and strategy of change. The foresight team worked with the entire country office to ensure the strategy was genuinely co-designed, iterated and validated. The result is a country strategy that challenges us to adapt and be agile by mainstreaming innovation and unconventional priorities, whilst continuing to invest in what is traditional and valuable in all that we do.
We also leveraged the work done in the country strategy to help design a future focused vision for the UN-wide North Macedonia Country Cooperation Framework. This process brought in heads of agencies from all UN organizations working in-country to instil a common UN vision, and to foster a collective appetite for change across the agencies.
3- Prototyping the UNHCR Country Office of the Future
The learnings and ideas emerging from the first two initiatives aim to help build the prototype of the UNHCR Country Office of the Future. This prototype isn’t aimed at completely restructuring the North Macedonia Country Office, but rather at ideas for both incremental and radical change in a relatively small and stable country office, that could potentially scale across the organization. It is a lever to carefully test the innovative ideas that emerge from the work of anticipatory governance, and aimed to ensure our work is relevant to those we serve.
The prototype covers key levers of change in governance and leadership, structure and roles, workflow and planning, learning and experimentation, communication, and importantly culture, attitude and behaviours of the country office.
Core values of the Country Office of the Future:
● Participatory — take in holistic perspectives of people;
● Anticipatory — look forward, be prepared;
● Curious — experiment and learn;
● Brave — try new things, take risks;
● Lean — improve efficiency, minimise waste;
● Amicable — nurture wholesome relationships.
What’s next?
We didn’t get to achieve everything we wanted to. Introducing new capabilities, designing a new participatory strategy and doing this in the middle of a global pandemic meant having to re-think the ways in which we carried out our work and delaying some of our ideas for the second half of 2020.
This next phase will see the team roll out initiatives to foster a participatory process for collective visioning for North Macedonia amongst government counterparts, other UN agencies and civil society. This will entail a series of co-creation visioning workshops with multiple, diverse stakeholders to design the possibilities of a future vision for the country.
Thanks to this experiment, we were able to illustrate how foresight can inform strategy and this is now something that UNHCR more broadly will be looking into as part of its only global strategic planning processes.
We are proud of the new excitement we’ve been able to ignite in our teams and office. We are proud of the dynamism and ideas that emerged, that challenged our assumptions not just about our role, but of who we are and what we are capable of. We are excited about what this might mean for how we better support people under our mandate, and how we continue to build trust within the communities we are a part of. And importantly, we are proud that a small idea that arose at a country office, was able to inspire new allies and flourish in 6 months — with the right support, leadership and investment. Now, we have to keep building on this momentum for a new adaptive, agile and anticipatory UNHCR.
