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This post seeks to address some of the “so what?” questions that followed through a lens of “radical collaboration.” It argues that the scale of uncertainty and complexity of today’s development challenges needs a different level of ambition and courage in tackling shared complex challenges and a different quality of collaboration, way beyond projects and conventional organizational and vertical boundaries. No organization, government or any other single entity for that matter can navigate the complexity and uncertainty we are facing today on its own. Radical uncertainty requires radical collaboration (Seppälä/Dunlop, 2021).
Investments in aligning UNDP’s capacity and authorizing environment with its value proposition (Strategic Plan) would need to be bold, synchronized (to keep the “three circles” converging) and go beyond UNDP itself to effect real change. Short-term, inward-looking fixes and lack of ambition play into long-term marginalization. Legitimacy and relevance accrue to those who have the capacity and capability to integrate and to collaborate systemically, not to those who compete, compartmentalize and projectize.
Aligning capacities and capabilities
The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the need for a different quality and scale of collaboration in international development. As part of its ‘Lessons in Multilateral Effectiveness’ series, the MOPAN network explored the obstacles multilateral organizations faced in responding to the COVID-19 crisis needs of host countries during the first year of the pandemic as well as factors for a better coordinated emergency response (MOPAN, 2022). The study concludes among its 5 lessons for multilateral responses to future crises that “… important barriers limit the extent of joint planning and programming” and that “fragmentation in resource mobilization contributes to competition, works against joint programming and undermines the achievement of collective outcomes”. Since the first year of COVID-19, crises and uncertainties have multiplied.
Over the past years, UNDP has been investing strategically in its “capacity circle,” notably in the formation of a Global Policy Network; in a global network of Accelerator Labs; in strategic innovation and in the shift from project- to portfolio-approaches; in innovative approaches to finance, digital, data, knowledge and much more. Years back, it was UNDP that advocated for pooled, multi-stakeholder funding, ‘invented’ what has since become known as multi-partner trust funds and established the UN’s Multi-Partner Trust Fund Office. These investments provide UNDP with launch pads, not just to demonstrate its integrator role in the UN development system, but also for a much more collaborative and strategic business model, beyond the current “world of (UNDP-led) projects.” These investments position UNDP well to embrace more extrovert, collaborative partnership approaches, mobilizing external capacities and capabilities that are complementary to its own.
Cooperation and partnerships are deeply engrained in UNDP’s DNA, but in their current form they tend to iterate on the prevailing, competitive business model of project delivery and absorb time and resources, project by project. Radical collaboration would imply a rethink; outward-looking strategic choices and imagination to mobilize capacities and capabilities for systemic change at scale.
Imagine, in a cascading order …
… if organizations currently competing for the same funding complemented their capabilities strategically with a long-term, systemic orientation, based on mandates and comparative advantages relevant to the challenge … and if donors, in turn, combined their funding and pursued long-term joint investments in systemic portfolios, turning traditional requests for proposals (“RFPs”) into open collaboration and partnership opportunities
…if, in the same vein, the Funding Compact and the Humanitarian Grand Bargain increased targets for strategic, flexible UN financing from the original 15 per cent to, say, 50 per cent, moving it from the margins to mainstream
…if multilateral (like the World Bank, UNDP, and UNEP); bilateral (such as GIZ, SIDA or USAID); innovative, new organizations (e.g., EIT Climate-KIC); and the private sector companies built a climate/energy alliance – or if the EU, UNDP and EBRD funded an urban transformation portfolio – based not on the usual bilateral “memoranda of understanding,” but by complementing or even partly merging their capacities and capabilities, bringing to bear their comparative strengths and advantages
… if UN development system reform would build on an intergovernmental consensus strong enough to go beyond coordination and operational effectiveness (as important as they are in their own right) and make strategic choices, such as dismantling duplicative or redundant capacities and consolidating or building capacities where they are needed now. Imagine if, as a result, the system would be positioned to maximize synergies between its global analytical and normative work, regional perspectives, and country-level interventions. Joined up this way, the UN development system would be unique. In its current state, the UN’s many competitive and discordant niche players tend to court those who argue for a UN à la carte in which UN agencies, funds and programmes tend to be reduced to contractors (Jenks, Barcena, Doryan, Civili, 2010).
… if organizations like UNDP and the World Bank shared or even partly merged their capabilities based on the obvious complementarity of their horizontal mandates and created an unprecedented level of presence, reach, access, and financial strength. As far-fetched and unrealistic as such imaginings may sound today, open discussions in this direction happened before, e.g., under the leadership of UNDP’s late Associate Administrator George Arthur Brown in the 1980s, in a different time and context.
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