Learning about implementing sustainable ...

Learning about implementing sustainable development in practice June 2015 - April 2016

Contents

Introduction Why Stories of sustainable development in practice Ten cross-cutting themes Learning about learning for sustainable development Selecting stories of sustainable development Mapping seven stories on sustainable development

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Perspectives on sustainable development Low carbon development Resilience Natural resource management

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Emerging themes 1. Designing for the implementation of international policies in context-sensitive ways and at multiple levels 2. Working with government leadership and through existing systems and structures 3. Building diverse partnerships to navigate complexity at scale and for innovation 4. Investing time in the process to build common understanding and coordinate action 5. Getting into action early and learning as you go 6. Building ownership with different stakeholders by experimenting with framing and language 7. Finding space for adaptive management within existing systems 8. Designing innovative and responsive funding models 9. Having patience and purpose on the journey to long term impact 10. Building capacity for sustainable development through a mix of roles that add strategic value

2 Learning about implementing sustainable development in practice

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DFID’s role

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Stories Investing in urban climate resilience Fighting chronic food insecurity Engaging the private sector to invest in renewable energy Building climate resilience in the Caribbean Reforming national forest governance Building climate resilience through community-based adaptation

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The story of our learning Introduction Timeline The learning journey Overall reflections Closing thoughts

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Appendix 1. Reflections on the Sustainable Development Learning Dialogue: methodology, methods and praxis 2. Introduction to the Sustainable Development Learning Dialogue 3. The learning questions 4. The overarching creative principles Acknowledgements Programmes and projects Other participants Project team

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Introduction Why

This publication tells the story of the Sustainable Development Learning Dialogue. Over the past nine months, we have been gathering and starting to share stories about what it looks and feels like to implement sustainable development in practice. When we started this work in June 2015 there was considerable interest in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which set out a new agenda for achieving sustainable development in its three dimensions – economic, social and environmental – in a balanced and integrated manner. The summer of 2015 also saw the run up to the Paris Climate Conference, which resulted in an agreement to: ‘strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change, in the context of sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty’. Given this renewed interest in sustainable development, many people in UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) wanted to know more about sustainable development in practice. Whilst there was an enormous amount of experience across the organisation in this area, many found it difficult to access this experience without knowing the right people to talk to. And even if they did know who to talk to, it could take time to gather stories and gain the insights they were after. A key aim of this report – and of the broader Sustainable Development Learning Dialogue of which it is a part – is therefore to improve access to relevant knowledge and share learning about doing sustainable development in practice. In line with the emphasis on becoming better at learning from within the organisation, and born out of an interest to broaden the range of approaches supporting organisational learning, this work was commissioned to explore the possibility of learning through short, accessible stories. In the spirit of experimenting with fresh approaches to learning, this focus on storytelling was seen as an opportunity to deepen practical insights within the broad portfolio of sustainable development work, while acting as one contribution among many to the learning process.


Stories of sustainable development in practice

Through the voices of experienced practitioners on the ground, we present a number of practical examples of how DFID is implementing sustainable development in practice. This is not an evaluation or a set of in-depth case studies; rather, this report contains a series of stories, each told through a range of different voices, on how sustainable development programmes are being designed and implemented. We hope that the insights gained from reading these stories will be used to help inform strategic decisions as well as improve or adapt specific areas of practice on the ground. I want the learning dialogue to help DFID think through how we deliver the SDGs in practice. Andrea Ledward, Head of DFID’s Climate & Environment Department I want to find out how other programmes have tackled the challenges or ramped up action on the ground successfully, and if their experiences of integrating sustainable development are similar to mine. Simone Bannister, C&E Adviser, DFID Caribbean I would like to learn from others who work on ICF programmes in urban areas so I can build more of it into my sustainable cities for growth programming. Rubbina Karruna, Cities Adviser, DFID Growth & Resilience Department These stories are based in people’s real experience. They told us what actually happened in practice, how the programmes evolved over time and what they experienced as critical milestones and contributions to make progress with sustainable development implementation. Some spoke of dilemmas and how they resolved these. Their voices are subjective, but no less meaningful. By speaking with a variety of stakeholders for each programme, both within and outside DFID, we brought together multiple voices and saw shared narratives and patterns emerge.

Ten cross-cutting themes

As well as setting out the stories within this report, we also highlight a series of themes which are shared across the stories. These themes point to common challenges and dilemmas, as well as emerging areas of practice and approaches, and particularly, to the ways in which DFID staff and others are approaching some of the challenges and opportunities of sustainable development.

Finding your own way

Although we present the themes before the stories, the report is designed to be read in different ways by different audiences. You can read from start to finish: beginning here with the introduction, then the ten themes, then on to the stories, and finally to the sections in which we reflect on DFID’s role and explain in more depth the approach we took in designing and undertaking this work. However, you may prefer to find your own way through, perhaps starting with the methodology (Annex 1) and then reading the stories, or starting with the stories before dipping into other sections. The report closes with a short story on learning reflections and recommendations.

Learning about learning for sustainable development

As this work was commissioned by DFID in the spirit of experimenting with fresh approaches to learning, the final section of this report provides more detail on the approach we took, and our reflections on what worked well and what didn’t. While our focus is on storytelling and its methodological underpinnings, we approached this work within a broader frame of facilitating organisational learning and of engaging different groups in dialogue as a basis for learning. Again, we highlight the methodologies we applied to this broader aspect of our work. Finally, by reflecting on our own learning process, our intention is to stimulate dialogue within DFID about the value of the methods and methodologies we have drawn upon in the context of seeking to improve organisational learning for sustainable development.

Selecting stories of sustainable development With renewed interest in sustainable development stimulated by the development of the SDGs as well as linkages to low carbon and climate resilient development, DFID set out five principles for sustainable economic development in summer 2015: 1. Supporting transformative and inclusive growth for poverty reduction 2. Helping countries transition to lower carbon development pathways 3. Building resilience to manage climate, environment and other risks 4. Improving stewardship of natural resources and the environment 5. Modernising the institutional architecture


As described in further detail in the learning reflection and methodology sections, the project team drew on this paper to shape the selection of our stories. We also asked a small cross-section of staff in DFID about the questions they had about implementing sustainable development in practice: Is it actually feasible to have growth AND a neutral or even positive effect on the environment? Are there trade-offs? If so where and how can we manage them? And also, how can we demonstrate to people who are sceptical that this is possible and better than the current model of growth? How do colleagues manage to navigate different terminologies, narratives and priorities to pursue a long-term goal? How to present the arguments for long term investments to achieve sustainability versus short term growth? How to embed sustainable development within the work of DFID when it concentrates on a growth paradigm; a reliance on the outdated Washington consensus; and the private sector?

Stories were selected to illustrate a range of approaches to sustainable development, focusing on different combinations of the five principles above. As shown in the map (page 5), while for some of the stories a primary focus was on resilience, for others it was on low carbon development or natural resource management. All of the stories drew on DFID programmes with a rich experience of designing and implementing sustainable development on the ground. They were also selected to cover a range of different contexts, cultures and entry points.

Mapping the stories of sustainable development Transforming Ethiopia’s economy1

Building climate resilience through community-based adaptation

Ethiopia Building climate resilience in the Caribbean Caribbean

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Designing for the implementation of international policies in context-sensitive ways and at multiple levels

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Building diverse partnerships to navigate complexity at scale and for innovation Investing time in the process to build common understanding and coordinate action

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Engaging the private sector to invest in renewable energy Uganda 9

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Designing innovative and responsive funding models

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Investing in urban climate resilience

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Building capacity for sustainable development through a mix of roles that add strategic value

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1 - The detail of the dialogue on Transforming Ethiopia’s economy has been kept confidential but the team were happy for us to share the broader learning from the process.

Perspectives on sustainable development To better understand sustainable development in practice, we explored projects focusing on low carbon development, resilience and natural resource management.

Low carbon development

Low carbon development is a focus of two of our stories: Engaging the private sector to invest in renewable energy and Transforming Ethiopia’s economy. In contrast to the extensive literature on the political barriers to a low carbon transition in many developed and BRICS nations, these two stories highlight possibilities for low carbon development under a fair political wind. The main focus of these stories is on the institutional mechanisms required to support low carbon development, and on the elements of good programme design that facilitate these. Both stories also illustrate the synergies that can be found between a low carbon transition, poverty alleviation, and inclusive economic development.

Compared to similar programmes that exist in the sub-Saharan market I’ve been really impressed by the GET FiT programme and team. The way they have structured the grant income for the project has attracted partners and investors that may not have typically been interested in the market. Vy Manthripragada, Private Sector Developer, Engaging the private sector to invest in renewable energy When you provide a reliable investment framework, people make commitments for 20 years. That’s something you don’t easily achieve in a sub-Saharan, African country. Now we realise, wow, we managed to get Uganda up to ninth place for clean tech investments globally among emerging economies. And of course you hope for spillover effects into other industries. This would be our greatest possible achievement. Rene Meyer, Secretariat, Engaging the private sector to invest in renewable energy

The government asked us to focus on green economy in the first phase because the Prime Minister believed that he first needed to show the world how Ethiopia would mitigate against climate change before he went out to the world to ask them to contribute financially to protect the country against the adverse effects of climate change. NGO representative, Transforming Ethiopia’s economy Having the CRGE vision and strategy has helped Ethiopia tell a broader story about what could have been defined as very narrow self-interest. Instead of saying ‘economically it makes sense to take advantage of our renewables base and make money by selling cheap electricity elsewhere’, they are able to cast it as, ‘this is really good for us, because it’s a responsible thing to do internationally. It shows other developing countries that it might be worth leapfrogging and going straight into renewables.’ If they can pull it off being really poor, maybe others can do it too. It expands the narrative. Donor representative, Transforming Ethiopia’s economy


Resilience

Resilience is the focus of five of our stories: Investing in urban climate resilience, Fighting chronic food insecurity, Building climate resilience in the Caribbean, Transforming Ethiopia’s economy and Building climate resilience through communitybased adaptation. Like sustainable development, resilience can be framed in many different ways. These five stories highlight the creative ways in which DFID was able to frame resilience in very different contexts and with a wide range of in-country partners, while also making critical linkages to poverty alleviation and inclusive growth. We spoke with the government about what would be a really cutting edge way of looking at climate change, recognising the uncertainty. There was very poor communication around climate change in Nepal. Some people saying: ‘it’s going to get a lot dryer’; other people saying: ‘no, it’s going to get wetter’. They were looking at different models. Looking at the range and thinking about how to approach the uncertainty we identified significant climate events based on particular dry periods or particular flooding periods and talked about those with communities. We asked them: ‘if you had more of these type of events what would happen’? ‘This event that happened five years ago, if that happens every other year how would you cope? What would your livelihood look like? How would you continue to thrive’? Clare Shakya, DFID, Building climate resilience through community-based adaptation The only time mayors get interested in planning and resilience is if they are disaster prone. We had to bring disasters, planning and investments a lot closer together. Even though we’re looking at long term impacts of climate, we need some of these entry points to engage at city level. The real prize is also looking at resilience not only through a disaster lens but also from the point of view of economic development. Shailaja Annamraju, DFID, Investing in urban climate resilience

This is a community project in Saint Thomas, Jamaica. It was interesting that they were linking degradation and vegetation loss in their communities to the fact that most of the young men had very little employment opportunities. They were all charcoal burners. They were cutting down these trees. Their community was convincing them to participate in this project in a way that would also provide them with an alternative livelihood stream and provide them with the information on the ongoing challenges that they faced, drought and extreme loss of portable water from traditional springs and so on. Cheryl Dixon, Caribbean Development Bank, Building climate resilience in the Caribbean DFID played a critical role in shaping the policy of government of Ethiopia on food security. We were probably the first donor to say, ‘We need to find a food solution for the chronically food insecure population, and an emergency response is not the right mechanism for those people.’ That was clearly stated in our country assistance plan in 2002. Melkamnesh Alamu, DFID, Fighting chronic food insecurity

Natural resource management

The focus of our final story Reforming national forest governance is on natural resource management and sustainable forestry. We spoke with a range of stakeholders involved in reshaping national forest governance in Ghana, who were drawing on the support of DFID’s Forest Governance, Markets and Climate Programme (FGMC). Many of these stakeholders spoke of the ways in which sustainable forestry can also produce synergies with inclusive growth and with poverty alleviation in Ghana, as well as areas where there have been trade-offs. If the EU is coming up with an action plan that will affect our trade relationship. We quickly will have to realign our own objectives. We also clearly saw that the VPA [Voluntary Partnership Agreement] arrangement is a trading tool that will help us to comply with legalities. We knew we needed some leverage to be able to enforce all the good laws that we have in forest management. Being able to tame the EU market and using that as a leverage to take care of our forests was a good match. Kofi Boakye, Domestic Lumber Association If we fully implement what we are doing, the VPA is going to help us to improve on our sustainable forest management practices. We are already improved on law enforcement. We are improving on data collection for better forest management. Even without exporting anything, if we are implementing the technical assistance, that’s promising for us for the sustainable management of our forests which translates also to development. Chris Beeko, Ghana Forestry Commission

When different ‘contested’ interests come together and reason out a collective result, it creates a new reality something transformative. We now see different interests come together in conflict and contestation and come to a result, it’s creating a new reality: businesses are paying their taxes, there are social responsibility agreements in place, the forest management plans are being paid in full and the domestic market is addressed as part of the VPA. Dermot Shields, PMST Team Leader We’ve come to the party with a poverty agenda. The timber trader doesn’t have that agenda, and he needs to be engaged. I need to be convinced that this process is going to have sustainable development results. This is embedded in the actions that the VPA supports, there is no explicit link in the VPA agreement itself. Julia Falconer, DFID


Emerging themes Looking across the portfolio of stories, a number of cross-cutting themes emerge. These point to common challenges and dilemmas, as well as emerging areas of practice and approaches. In particular, the themes point to ways in which DFID staff and others are approaching some of the challenges and opportunities of sustainable development. Taking an appreciative approach, the themes focus on what works and the advice the practitioners we spoke to would give to someone designing a similar programme. The challenges they faced are woven through as the problems framing each of the themes.

1. Designing for the implementation of international policies in context-sensitive ways and at multiple levels Addressing climate change, resilience or sustainable development in the context of development cooperation requires an interplay of both the wider international policy context and the more specific in-country or crosscountry situation. While the impetus for a programme was often provided through an international policy process, our stories reveal that the way programmes are designed and implemented is highly contextual; they are continuously adapted to both the political economy and the environmental landscape DFID works in, as well as to the needs and priorities of the stakeholders in those situations. Many programmes also work at multiple scales. This requires holding an overarching vision or framework, while working out what’s needed nationally, sub-nationally and/ or locally, again in response to variations in the political economy, or to geographic differences. The programmes’ task has been to make global policy challenges relevant and specific to the local context.

When I arrived in Addis I was given a mandate to figure out what DFID’s response in Ethiopia should be on climate change, and it was a pretty blank piece of paper. At that stage, no one really knew what climate change looked like in terms of development interventions, in a country like Ethiopia. Donor representative, Transforming Ethiopia’s economy We look at the whole climate change issue from the angle of impact first. For example, water supply, what supplies the village and how does climate change impact this? Whereas conventional development programming will focus on asking people what they think their development needs are. Sabita Thapa, DFID, Building climate resilience through community-based adaptation For Ghana the EU market was less valuable than it once was. In 2008 the demand for tropical hard woods significantly dropped. At the time Ghana looked for markets in other places like the Middle East and elsewhere. Large companies in Ghana remain extremely interested in regaining the market share in Europe. There’s also the 2008 amendment to the Lacey Act in the US. Now companies importing illegal timber to the US could be prosecuted. These were clear incentives for Ghana to support the FLEGT process. Clare Brogan, FLEGT facilitator, Reforming national forest governance In some cases this involved working in bottom up ways to ensure that local realities were represented in programme governance structures and resource allocations; in other cases a process of continuous dialogue and adaptation between top down, middle out and bottom up approaches was required.


The most important thing is to look at the country that you are in. Look at the country’s needs; its circumstances; and preconditions. Everything starts with that. Jan Martin, KfW, Engaging the private sector to invest in renewable energy Basically all of our regional programmes are defined by national priorities. Whatever we do must have relevance to the countries. Dr Ulric Trotz, CCCCC, Building climate resilience in the Caribbean ‘Best practice’ often doesn’t work here in Ethiopia– and it doesn’t work in lots of places–‘best practice’ is being defined in this ethereal, quite technocratic way–it isn’t pragmatic enough. NGO representative, Transforming Ethiopia’s economy We needed something that builds on the enormous amount of community-based development knowledge in Nepal, but is equally, linked to the government processes. That’s why this LAPA idea came up, building on all that ability of community forestry and local development programmes. Simon Lucas, DFID, Building climate resilience through community-based adaptation Context matters on smaller scales, too – regional differences can inform programme design. In the end, what really mattered was to not enter the process with all the answers.

Emerging themes 2. Working with government leadership and through existing systems and structures We heard time and again about how important it is to embed sustainable development programmes into government systems and structures – and about how finding the right government leaders, champions and sponsors made a huge difference in implementing a successful programme. After 30 years of annual humanitarian responses in Ethiopia, it became clear that the international community and the government were responding to a chronic and growing drought problem. The Government of Ethiopia realised that business as usual was not working. They wanted to move from an emergency response to a more developmental response to address the root causes of vulnerability. Kelly Johnson, Donor Coordination Team, Fighting chronic food insecurity We were looking for something that was investable. At the same time, our government advisors were saying: ‘don’t make it complicated, build on what’s already there.’ There was a lot of debate about the use or non-use of government systems. Simon Lucas, DFID, Building climate resilience through community-based adaptation We weren’t sure if the CRGE Facility would come off. We knew that that was, at the end of the day, the most direct modality, and the best in terms of donor harmonisation and supporting government systems. It’s the best way of helping Ethiopia manage climate finance, because it’s directly through the Ministry of Finance and it’s right behind their own CRGE vision. And it pools donor money. Donor representative, Transforming Ethiopia’s economy


There were examples where programme implementation was delayed – either because it took longer to find the right in-country owner, or because of the time needed to integrate the programme into the government’s systems and structures. Making the local government talk to the Ministry of Environment was a major challenge. But the implementation and process has to be owned by the local government and it has to be understood by them, no matter how slow the design process is. I would actually not create any additional institutional structures at the local or national level- use whatever’s there. We try to use existing forums for coordination: climate change requires a lot of coordination! Sabita Thapa, DFID, Building climate resilience through community-based adaptation There were problems with implementation capacity. We were delivering a large scale safety net programme through a government system that wasn’t designed for this. At one point the cash and the food transfers weren’t going out fast enough. We realised there weren’t enough cashiers and accountants in the finance office at the district. Another time, the banks didn’t have enough liquidity. This has improved over time as staff at all levels trained on the programme implementation modalities started to understand the importance of timely and predictable transfers. Melkamnesh Alemu, DFID, Fighting chronic food insecurity It’s been a really slow process for us to pick cities: Cities have to decide firmly that they want to borrow money for a project. That’s a very different commitment than a donor saying ‘hey, we’re gonna choose cities to help you build capacity and do resilience planning’. Shailaja Annamraju, DFID, Investing in urban climate resilience

The overriding message was that working within existing systems and structures is a key enabler of sustainable development and of mainstreaming climate-related issues into development planning. It was so important for the DFID practitioners we spoke to that, in almost all cases, they took the time to identify the right leaders among politicians or government bureaucrats and gain agreement to work through their systems and structures. At times, they chose to delay implementation until they had done so, rather than push on and set up projects outside government systems. In the end, the integration within existing structures has enabled the long-term impact of programmes. We agreed with the government that we will revise the LAPA framework for more clarity and simplicity. Actually, the whole process was handed over to the government–a joint secretary, who was the head of the Climate Change Management Division, led it. Sabita Thapa, DFID, Building climate resilience through community-based adaptation The Ugandan regulator openly collaborated with KfW and GET FiT resulting in a strong framework that can remain in place once donors exit the market. Vy Manthripragada, PSD, Engaging the private sector to invest in renewable energy The heads of government asked: how do we implement that program? That is where the implementation plan came in. After 18 months, it was submitted to them through COTED. In March 2012 at their intersessionary meeting, it was approved. Shortly after that, the Cabinet of Barbados invited us. We were pleasantly surprised that they had begun adjusting their strategic plan to align it with the regional implementation plan. Dr Kenrick Leslie, CCCCC, Building climate resilience in the Caribbean Political will matters. You get the mayor, the planning people, the municipal corporation on board and you’re a long way ahead in planning [resilience] into investments. Building resilient cities is actually possible if you have good leadership. Shailaja Annamraju, DFID, Investing in urban climate resilience

Emerging themes 3. Building diverse partnerships to navigate complexity at scale and for innovation To manage the increasing complexity of sustainable development and livelihoods issues as environmental impacts increase, many programmes told us how they chose to bring together partnerships with diverse experiences, skills and viewpoints to understand the issues systemically, come up with responses and implement them at the appropriate scale. Especially in contested policy areas, bringing in new and uncommon partners can provide the necessary impetus for change and innovation.

We asked local partners: ‘If you were to improve forest law enforcement and governance, you have got to define yourself what your problems are. There are a lot of different views and fundamental issues, but what, collectively, as a society, do you want to do?’ We then helped to bring the parties together. We had our views, but what needs to be done had to come through them. There was a view that governments make laws, but this was for the people to decide. Giving society an involvement greatly increases the likelihood that laws will actually be implemented. That was a deliberative, iterative process where stakeholders worked through what they were going to do. John Hudson, former DFID staff, Reforming national forest governance


A common denominator was the insight that this problem is too big and complex for any of us to deal with separately. We tried to work in a partnership model that could be more efficient and effective than what had been done in the past. Without that, it is unlikely that development partners would have supported the PSNP as it aims to address a complex developmental challenge where you don’t see changes overnight. Building such an ambitious partnership was only possible by creating a process where everybody felt included and could play their part. That created enough confidence that things were going in the right direction. Wout Soer, World Bank, Fighting chronic food insecurity The nature of partnerships varied across the programmes and depending on the context: from grassroots partnerships between communities and the private sector, to international partnerships between global institutions. While the diversity of the partnership often increased the need for coordination, new types of partners also brought in new perspectives and the ability to scale the impact far beyond the abilities of any one organisation.

When I visited in August 2011 I was really struck by the people round the table that donor representative #1 had managed to convene, the government, speaking really frankly and openly, to the EPA, Ato Dessalegne and his deputy; various donors; NGOs; and McKinsey. It was really a room full of interested individuals, who all had something to offer, who were all thinking really energetically about: ‘How can we make this work?’ That was exciting. I hadn’t really seen that before. Donor representative, Transforming Ethiopia’s economy It’s like some kind of jigsaw, you need different components to come together. Sometimes, when you bring together government institutions and implementation partners, one of them fails to connect. But this time everybody has come in and been willing to connect and accept each other’s stresses and timelines. Through everybody’s willingness to move together, everything has managed to move forward. ERA, Engaging the private sector to invest in renewable energy Rockefeller brought in some of the know how on this issue and partners to work with. DFID brought obviously the lion’s share of the financial resources. They also brought knowledge in terms of programme development as well as around urban development. The ADB brings in the relationships, the infrastructure in terms of country officers and government relationships that we rely on to get access to cities and develop infrastructure proposals. Cristina Rumbaitis del Rio, formerly Rockefeller Foundation, Investing in urban climate resilience

Emerging themes 4. Investing time in the process to build common understanding and coordinate action Many of the programmes we spoke to invested heavily in some kind of coordination (or secretariat) function. Even though such ‘soft’ functions can be hard to justify in ‘hard’ results-based language and funding allocations, investing time in the process to build common understanding and coordinate action came up again and again. A lot of the partners have a strong presence on the ground, so they are able to engage regularly. To partner with the PSNP, people agree to a fairly heavy meeting schedule. I average 30 to 35 hours of meetings a week. I’d never thought I would spend so much time in meetings in my life, ever. But, it’s necessary to build partnerships and trust. Investing in one channel–the Donor Coordination Team–is a more effective use of their resources and time rather than each agency trying to work separately with the government. Kelly Johnson, Donor Coordination Team, Fighting chronic food insecurity Given the complexity of the issues at hand and the diversity of the stakeholders involved, many told us how critical it had been for them to spend time upfront to build a shared understanding of the concept. These interventions were often very strategic and diplomatic and mobilised a highly sensitive political environment, often including voices that would otherwise not get heard.

[The conference in Bellagio] was a serendipitous event: a lot of players were at a point in their strategies on climate change or urban development where they could come together. People with enough decisionmaking power were in the room so that the ideas discussed didn’t get dissipated after the meeting. Cristina Rumbaitis del Rio, formerly Rockefeller Foundation, Investing in urban climate resilience It was a really exciting moment, we brought a lot of stakeholders together and they all said we really believe in bottom-up development. We shouldn’t have NAPAs we should have LAPAs. That led to perhaps one of the greatest innovations. Clare Shakya, DFID, Building climate resilience through community-based adaptation By late May, early June 2005, we had a national workshop identifying the different perspectives and commonalities of the stakeholder groups. All wanted to see that the timber industry continued in Ghana in a sustainable manner. Clare Brogan, FLEGT facilitator, Reforming national forest governance The importance of agreeing on principles for coordination and continuing to invest time and resources to have someone on staff orchestrating the coordination of partners and facilitating the progress of programmes was also highlighted as key; many programmes invested in coordinating teams and systems from the start.


For large-scale, national-type programmes, you need to invest upfront in partnerships. Coordination is not something that happens automatically. One of the first things that happened in this programme was the decision to invest in a coordination team whose function is to make sure that everybody is aware of the same processes, has access to the same amount of information, and can represent development partners in a dialogue to facilitate more structured engagement with the government. Wout Soer, World Bank, Fighting chronic food insecurity As the secretariat manager, that’s my most important role. I’m somewhat the spider in the web, just trying to keep all the links together. Rene Meyer, Secretariat, Engaging the private sector to invest in renewable energy Deliberation is a structured process, a transformational exercise. It’s got an agenda, so it’s not just having a chat. It has intention, a product at the end. The more important it is obviously the more involved people are going to be. It needs to be inclusive. If you leave out key stakeholders, you’re going to get a weaker deliberative process. Finally, what makes it transformative is that it’s informed. If you can bring in evidence, in the form of monitoring, of studies, of ideology and frameworks or whatever, then you raise the debate. The interest groups have to face something that is greater and different to the baggage they brought into the room. Dermot Shields, PMST Team Leader, Reforming national forest governance

Emerging themes 5. Getting into action early and learning as you go When the programmes we spoke to were set up, they were often driven by a clear sense of urgency: they needed to move beyond business as usual in order to solve the problem. This urgency encouraged them to get into action fast and build a culture of experimentation. The PSNP went to scale immediately. There’s often a storyline around pilots to figure out how to do it. Often, pilots seem to get stuck in that piloting phase. I think partly because we’re trying to get perfect at a smaller scale. Whereas if you immediately go to scale, you’re forced to fix it as it goes because then the risks associated with just stopping are too great. The PSNP engaged in this process of figuring out what the problems were and fixing them. If we had piloted the programme, we never would have done it, because there were so many problems. Sarah Coll-Black, World Bank, Fighting chronic food insecurity What’s the role of these demonstration-type projects? It’s to indicate what’s possible, and then to work with governments to either change policy or to get them implemented within their respective countries. In St. Lucia a pilot project looked at demonstrating that building codes are worth pursuing. Clearly, they have financial implications because if we want persons to build to a certain standard, the costs of such buildings are likely to go up. After the project, the Government of St. Lucia changed its policy to ensure that any new hotel entity would need to put in the same technology. Based on that, it was repeated in Barbados.” Dr Mark Bynoe, CCCCC, Building climate resilience in the Caribbean


Learning from practice helped the programmes get better over time: some deliberately worked with pilot projects that were then adapted to new locations, others rolled out a rudimentary version of their service at scale and improved from there. This also helped the programmes in re-evaluating assumptions. The concept of urban climate resilience might be contested, but when you start explaining what resilience looks like in practice, people agree with it and understand it. Sometimes you need to forget the concept and just start doing it.” Sam Kernaghan, consultant to the UCCRTF, Investing in urban climate resilience We started out with this programme assuming that all the banks would require a partial risk guarantee from the World Bank. Then as we went along with projects, the market for renewables in Uganda evolved, people were able to see that the government was serious about putting a structure in place that would work and tariffs were immutable. Over time, people just realised that perhaps they don’t need an additional risk mitigation from the World Bank. Jan Martin, KfW, Engaging the private sector to invest in renewable energy We tested that hypothesis in 10 districts, and based on that learning, we designed a framework for implementing adaptation programmes at a grassroots level. Deepak Rijal, independent consultant, Building climate resilience through community-based adaptation

There was no clear roadmap – instead it was a learning process for all of us involved. NGO representative, Transforming Ethiopia’s economy Data – be it from official evaluations and programme reviews, from regular surveys and field trips – played a crucial role in informing the learning process. The idea of these Fast Track Investment projects was that they would be priming the system and that’s what they’ve been doing. That has been really interesting as a process and for us as a learning process. I think it’s been very good for the ministries to see where the gaps are and for donors as well. Donor representative, Transforming Ethiopia’s economy

Emerging themes 6. Building ownership with different stakeholders by experimenting with framing and language Most of the programmes we spoke to faced the challenge of framing their priorities of resilience, low carbon development and natural resources management in ways that led to effective engagement with the priorities of other stakeholders, including project partners. We were struck by the nuanced ways in which these programmes chose to adapt their language to the context they were operating in to ensure that they were communicating in a way that made sense for these stakeholders, but without compromising core principles. While we heard more about the synergies than about the tradeoffs involved in such approaches, what came across in many of these programmes was both the skillfulness required to ‘hold the line’ between different discourses, and also the effectiveness of what could be achieved as a result. The Urban Climate Change Resilience Trust Fund (UCCRTF) needed to find their own way to talk about resilience in the context of cities and infrastructure financing to connect with their audiences. The key here was to keep the language both tangible and specific to the context. One of the core principles of resilience is iteration. Don’t get caught up in definitions too early on. Have the intention be clear, but absolutely let the process and the iterations that happen within the process define the specifics over time. This is something really interesting for a lot of development projects. You commit to a log frame at some point, right? In six or seven years, things can considerably change. Adjusting the project through the course of implementation isn’t seen as a failure, right? Sasank Vemuri, consultant to the UCCRTF, Investing in urban climate resilience In some situations a programme would act as a very effective champion for new ways of thinking about – and doing – sustainable development, whereas in other situations the focus would be on simplifying this framing; or on finding the angle of the programme that would appeal to each of the different stakeholder agendas.


There was a lot of discussion around how to simplify adaptation at the local level. My first job was to make a very, very simple document, something that could be understood by the community, who are the owners of that policy. We also had a lot of discussions about the local development officers who were not very technical. Sabita Thapa, DFID, Building climate resilience through community-based adaptation The second thing is about not being very technical or jargonistic on climate change. Don’t explain climate change actions at the local level in terms of global warming or a 2-5 degree rise in temperature. Given the challenges in climate change awareness, we avoided calling any of these actions climate change actions. In many places, we didn’t actually use the word climate change at all. Instead, we spoke about making development actions more sustainable in the long run. Sabita Thapa, DFID, Building climate resilience through community-based adaptation People are thinking employment and medical. They’re not realising that we rely so much on the environment and there are aspects of it that we have to work on to have those livelihoods and to have that employment. Now that local fishermen are feeling the effects of not being able to catch fish, and we’re seeing what’s happening to our coral reefs, they now say: ‘hold on a second. What can we do’? Heidi Clarke, Sandals Foundation, Building climate resilience in the Caribbean

Emerging themes 7. Finding space for adaptive management within existing systems None of the programmes we spoke with followed their original plan to the letter. Instead, they incorporated learning acquired during implementation, took advantage of partnerships and opportunities that could not have been foreseen, or adapted their timeline to a slower pace, where necessary. Practitioners skilfully found ways to creatively address the resulting challenges for programme funding, results-based management and impact assessment. Whenever we change one thing, other things also change at the same time and we don’t always know how they’re going to change. It isn’t appropriate to develop a rigid strategy from the outset and say, “This is what we are going to do.” There are a whole range of appropriate strategies, which are adapted to local context and can be innovative. John Hudson, former DFID staff, Reforming national forest governance Through the rapid response mechanism, we visit selected districts every quarter to see programme implementation, identify problems and provide solutions on the spot. If there are issues which can’t be resolved by the team, then they raise it to the highest level. Melkamnesh Alemu, DFID, Fighting chronic food insecurity The donors were willing to adopt an approach of learning and incremental change. It’s okay if it’s not perfect today, and we’re going to work with the government to make it perfect over time. There are other countries, other donors, and other contexts that want perfection from the beginning. Sarah Coll-Black, World Bank, Fighting chronic food insecurity Programme design was seen as a starting point for the work, not the end point. It was important for practitioners to not get too hung up on the plan and to make adjustments when needed.


There has to be flexibility to adapt the programme to lessons you learn during implementation. This is not always easy to manage. We have a tendency to try to fix things and to put in place targets that then become a goal in itself, without taking a step back and looking at whether the situation is slightly different than we thought originally. Those original targets are maybe not that important. If we said we would cover a million people this year but in reality we’re only going to cover 750,000, it’s not easy to say that’s good enough. There is a tendency to say: ‘we have to get the million, otherwise we are doing a bad job’. Sometimes 750,000 in this context is actually brilliant, because our initial assumption was wrong. You need to make an adjustment in your perception of what success or failure is. Wout Soer, World Bank, Fighting chronic food insecurity Resource budgeting, results-based management, and those things, tends to force us to work at a pace which is an artificial one when compared to the genuine pace of what is happening in a development process in a development-deficit country. That doesn’t mean that things go slow. Things go slow, slow, quick, quick, slow, but you’ve got to be there and ready to respond. At times, you have to respond immediately, but also, during the slow period, you have to be investing hugely in what’s going to come up. Simon Anderson, IIED, Building climate resilience through community-based adaptation

High-level documents, manuals and frameworks provided the structure and flexibility to adapt the detailed plans. From a conceptual framework, we developed modalities on how to get there at the grassroots level: like vulnerability assessments and planning processes; steps on how to go about that; how we target people; and also targeting the most vulnerable areas. A step-bystep process was designed into the LAPA process. Deepak Rijal, independent consultant, Building climate resilience through community-based adaptation When I started in this role I was told that the plan was ready to be signed off and the CRGE Facility was ready to be launched, and neither of those things happened as quickly as we had hoped. In fact it took many months more than we thought it would and I spent quite a bit of my time basically working almost full time with staff at GGGI Ethiopia and with the UNDP consultant writing the Operational Manual, which I still think was a good use of my time. Donor representative, Transforming Ethiopia’s economy

Emerging themes 8. Designing innovative and responsive funding models The programmes we interviewed went far beyond traditional project funding to deliver impact. Instead, they took advantage of the flexibility that DFID’s funding offered to make sure it could reach the people and programmes, where and when it’s needed. We covered about 5 million people every year but during the same period there were about 2 to 3 million more people who needed emergency assistance. A risk financing component was included in PSNP 2, to expand support when it’s needed and shrink when the need is not there. That’s being flexible, using an adaptive approach. Melkamnesh Alemu, DFID, Fighting chronic food insecurity It’s very rare to get it right in terms of funding from the country level, meshing with funding from the regional level and the international level. Here, there is a good story to tell about the way in which that’s been locked into a framework, which DFID helped to create. We continue to work within that framework, and continue to help develop it. Mark Smith, DFID, Building climate resilience through community-based adaptation The GET FiT team really thought through the economics of these smaller projects and the way the funding should work. The sophistication of the structuring is very unique, and it impressed us, our board and potential investors, resulting in the development of 3 small projects over a 2-year period. Vy Manthripragada, PSD, Engaging the private sector to invest in renewable energy


We have increased flexibility in the delivery of safety nets to better respond to the differences across regions and districts in Ethiopia. Originally the cash transfer value was uniform. In the last 5 years, we have introduced variable metrics where we pay people different amounts depending on where they live to reflect variations in the local prices of food. We allow flexibility in delivery to better respond to how long ago food insecurity manifested in different areas of the country. Sarah Coll-Black, World Bank, Fighting chronic food insecurity Sometimes, it was really critical to get money flowing to different stakeholders quickly. In other cases, DFID pooled funding with other donors, and worked alongside in-country governments to build capacity for transparent, accountable and effective disbursement. Instead of just providing grants, some programmes also worked with loans, structuring the funding to fit with private sector investment requirements. The introduction of feed-in tariffs for renewable energy in Uganda challenged the programme team to really understand the economic incentives: Donors are geared towards disbursing funds. Everyone needs to hit their targets. The GET FiT tariff top-up payments are only disbursed once the projects actually produce electricity. Donors committing funding in 2013 or 2014 will only be fully dispersed in 2017 or 2018 at the earliest. Jan Martin, KfW, Engaging the private sector to invest in renewable energy

GET FiT was always about the portfolio. We’re not talking about one project, we’re talking about up to 20–facilitating $400–500million of private investment–which are key for the security and affordability of supply in this country. Rene Meyer, Secretariat, Engaging the private sector to invest in renewable energy You look at the environment that has been created, the instruments that have been put in place, the confidence that has been built and I think we should be able to sustain the momentum. We are approving many permits and licences. The economic benefits can be felt. ERA, Engaging the private sector to invest in renewable energy In the end, innovative funding models allowed the programmes to ensure that the funding available made an impact. The beauty of the Climate Change Policy is what the Prime Minister told us at the time: ‘you have to ensure that the funding for climate change reaches the ground’. That political message was translated into action through the Climate Change Policy that states more than 80% of the climate change funding must reach the village. The politicians were able to instruct us to develop a mechanism that ensures that more funding is channeled to the field level activities. It’s on that basis the NCCSP was developed. Batu Uprety, Government, Building climate resilience through community-based adaptation

Emerging themes 9. Having patience and purpose on the journey to long term impact One of the things that struck us about almost all of our stories was their long term nature. Not only did DFID’s work in these programmes often have roots from years earlier, many of the initiatives were also themselves long term – 10 years in the case of Ethiopia’s Public Safety Net Programme (PSNP) and 7-9 years in the case of several others. This in turn affords insights that are simply not available with many shorter term programmes, which run no longer than five years. We saw some results after 2 years, but we saw exponentially better results after 4 years and then again we saw exponentially better results after 6 years. It’s not a linear process. We would never have got to the 10-year results, where we’re seeing this dramatic decline in food insecurity if we hadn’t stayed the course for the full 10 years and if we hadn’t engaged with the government around our learning from the monitoring missions to incrementally improve the delivery of the programme. Sarah Coll-Black, World Bank, Fighting chronic food insecurity You have to believe in the possibility for success and change. You have to be willing to be engaged at every level. You have to be willing to navigate. We have to have a longer view for these kinds of programmes and initiatives: it’s not like building a road. There are many, many interlocking parts. You have to be prepared to do it for the long haul. Cheryl Dixon, Caribbean Development Bank, Building climate resilience in the Caribbean


We noticed for example that while some programmes, such as PSNP and CRGE in Ethiopia, mobilised quite quickly, others, like the resilience programmes in the Caribbean and South and Southeast Asia, took their time to get started. In these cases, while the early phases often went comparatively slowly, they were laying much needed foundations through building capacity, shared understanding and delivery systems. Such foundations might have been difficult to plan for in advance, but they enabled quicker progress and more impactful delivery later.

If we would have added the traditional project mindset, we would have said after three or four years, “Not very impressive, next.” That would have been a major mistake. This is a very complex, large, long-term change management process. We got where we are now by accepting that and saying, “Okay, let’s chip away at this a little bit more and then see where we end up.’ Looking back at where we are now, nobody could have predicted that this process would go as far as it has gone. Wout Soer, World Bank, Fighting chronic food insecurity

Although big changes take a long time to deliver, there are milestones that you can demonstrate. You must give confidence at the political and the managerial level that the money is being used wisely and is producing results. You can’t just say, this is really important but it takes a long time so come back to me in ten years time and I’ll show you what we’ve done.” John Hudson, former DFID staff, Reforming national forest governance

The government is now financing the PSNP for the first time. They historically financed the other parts of the Food Security Programme and the donors financed the PSNP. This demonstrates how staying the course has resulted in something that is sustainable in the long run. The government is now committed to putting a social protection system in place, it’s going to take them many years. They’ve asked the donors to stay the course with them so that they have the time to bring their financing on stream in a way that they can find it affordable. Sarah Coll-Black, World Bank, Fighting chronic food insecurity

And while none of our stories were planned as long-term initiatives, each reveals in different ways the value of balancing short, medium and longer term outcomes and having patience and holding purpose in the search of long term impact. In the case of PSNP in Ethiopia, the government is now planning to include the programme in its own services.

Emerging themes 10. Building capacity for sustainable development through a mix of roles that add strategic value Looking across the stories and the emerging themes, we noticed time and again the emphasis that is placed on capacity building – and the diversity of approaches to capacity building from DFID and other actors. There was genuine ownership. In a recent evaluation, many people interviewed felt there was a change in practice in the forestry commission as a result of the process. Not just that the rules of the game were different but that the way that people were behaving was different. Clare Brogan, FLEGT facilitator, Reforming national forest governance The government was really committed to playing a key role in international climate negotiations and wanted to be able to demonstrate that it was responding to adaptation needs in its own country. This has been achieved – in spite of the bureaucratic challenges; frequent staff movements within the ministry; and huge geographical challenges in terms of getting to the areas that are most vulnerable. Mark Smith, DFID, Building climate resilience through community-based adaptation We then had a very cooperative and active counterpart with ERA. One of the positive windfall benefits of the programme is that they really developed this strong standing– they are somebody in the sector now–which was not the case back in 2011. We always tried to ensure that government has the feeling that they are in the driving seat. Rene Meyer, Secretariat, Engaging the private sector to invest in renewable energy

Even within the bank there has been a change in mindsets. When I got there the engineers said: ‘do we need a treehugger?’ Now we have young engineers here who fully embrace the concept of gender equity. They’re big into understanding community consultations and why we need to have them, why they simply can’t go in and build a school and not talk to the community about it. A lot has changed here. Cheryl Dixon, Caribbean Development Bank, Building climate resilience in the Caribbean Whether through providing technical input; building people’s ability to measure and implement social and environmental management approaches; working with and strengthening government structures and systems; creating new partnerships, using participatory approaches to build local ownership; or supporting governments to take leadership on the global or regional stage – this focus on capacity building was continually reflected in the broader perceived outcomes of the different initiatives. The general empowerment of the stakeholders has spread in some communities: community members have had the audacity to block roads for timber companies who they suspected to be operating illegally. Samuel Nketiah, Tropenbos, Reforming national forest governance The LAPA policy framework is so well accepted. If you go to the districts today, the local communities understand LAPA. One thing I really like about this programme is that the money has actually reached people. With many of the government programmes I have seen about 60 to 70% of the money remains at the central level but LAPA has ensured funds flow directly to the local level. And, the additionality is that considerable local capacity has been built. Sabita Thapa, DFID, Building climate resilience through community-based adaptation


Distributed power plants in remote locations help us minimise losses and stabilise voltages across the country. Our reliability improves because we stop relying on one plant and, we exploit our power potential because we increase the amount of power available. This brings social benefits, such as employment, capacity building and expertise. Vincent Kasangaki, IC, Engaging the private sector to invest in renewable energy CCCCC has just been accredited to the Green Climate Fund (GCF). That’s been a great result, not only in terms of access to finance but also in ensuring that CCCCC has proper systems and procedures in place. Accreditation requires scrutiny of accountability mechanisms, procurement systems and due diligence, and has thus created an incentive and given them guidance to strengthen their work. Simone Banister, DFID, Building climate resilience in the Caribbean Within the coming 10 years we want to gradually move the programme from a predominantly donorfinanced initiative to a fully government- financed initiative. We have agreed a 10-year transition with the government to transform this programme into a proper national, social protection system, financed from the national budget. We’ve seen a number of big policy changes in the past 5 years including the social protection policy and the disaster risk management policy. They created the platform for the dialogue to gradually phase out the development-partner assistance. That was a major milestone, and a change in thinking on the government side. Wout Soer, World Bank, Fighting chronic food insecurity

DFID’s role External partners appreciated DFID’s strategic involvement in these ambitious programmes. In addition to providing funding and accountability for programme delivery, we saw DFID add value through a sophisticated mix of roles: Incubator. More than once, DFID was the first donor to commit to a particular issue, spotting early opportunities where its funding could become a catalyst for change.

Convener. Often, DFID was instrumental in bringing different players together and coordinating donor funding to align efforts and have more impact.

Overall, DFID played a major role as an enabler and capacity builder, and astutely provided technical input where it made the most difference.

DFID played a critical role in shaping the policy of government of Ethiopia on food security. We were probably the first donor to say, ‘We need to find a food solution for the chronically food insecure population, and an emergency response is not the right mechanism for those people.’ That was clearly stated in our country assistance plan in 2002. Melkamnesh Alamu, DFID, Fighting chronic food insecurity

We asked local partners: ‘If you were to improve forest law enforcement and governance, you have got to define yourself what your problems are. There are a lot of different views and fundamental issues, but what, collectively, as a society, do you want to do?’ We then helped to bring the parties together. We had our views, but what needs to be done had to come through them. There was a view that governments make laws, but this was for the people to decide. Giving society an involvement greatly increases the likelihood that laws will actually be implemented. That was a deliberative, iterative process where stakeholders worked through what they were going to do. John Hudson, former DFID staff, Reforming national forest governance

We did a stakeholder analysis, validated and developed theories of change. In parallel we commissioned the Future Proofing Cities study to provide the evidence base. The next thing was be part of the initial members urban virtual network. I do this a lot now, in helping others engineer new programme development. You have to support planning processes in cities but there are big governance gaps. Shailaja Annamraju, DFID, Investing in urban climate resilience

DFID was one of the first donors to start to mobilise around the implementation plan [in 2012] Simone Banister, DFID, Building climate resilience in the Caribbean Clare Shakiya was instrumental really in bringing this issue forward, she proposed to provide additional funding for NAPA preparation. Our NAPA is different. We get $200,000 from the LDC fund and $875,000 from DFID. It gave us a lot of opportunity to not only prepare the NAPA, but to create awareness at different levels. Batu Uprety, Government, Building climate resilience through community-based adaptation Innovator. DFID brought innovation and flexibility to the design of funding and governance models. As soon as it was clear that our money was not sufficient to fund all the projects because of US$ exchange losses, it was actually DFID that came to us and said: ‘what can we do about it? Can we disburse funds earlier’? Kathrin Käestle, KfW, Engaging the private sector to invest in renewable energy


We now have more of a sense of what works here, what didn’t work, where Ethiopia is trying to get to on climate and where we might be able to add value. It’s the catalytic effect of our money and our support and our willingness to take that risk to be the first mover that interests me, because then you can bring in other donors…It would be great if we could use our money and our support for the CRGE Facility over the next 3-5 years to continue funding it, as it starts to capture more and more of this green international finance that’s going to flow. Donor representative, Transforming Ethiopia’s economy We actually led all the donor partners together and signed up a Donor Compact on Climate Change with the government of Nepal for mutual cooperation. Sabita Thapa, DFID, Building climate resilience through community-based adaptation

Stories of sustainable development in practice


Investing in urban climate resilience The story of the Urban Climate Change Resilience Trust Fund (2009-2015) The multi-donor Urban Climate Change Resilience Trust Fund (UCCRTF) aims to build resilience to the effects of climate change and reduce the vulnerability of the urban poor in 25 medium-sized cities in Asia. In addition to infrastructure investments, the trust fund provides grants that enable cities to prioritise actual resilience needs in their planning processes and service delivery. The partnership was initially founded by DFID, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and has since welcomed USAID and SECO. We want to get roughly 25 cities in 7 countries: India, Pakistan, Vietnam, Indonesia, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and Myanmar. We have will mobilise $1billion through the ADB, by co-financing and using domestic resources at city level. Shailaja Annamraju, DFID

Context The Rockefeller Foundation had pioneered work on urban climate change resilience in Asia and could leverage their knowledge and experiences around resilience planning. Through our ACCCRN programme, we had engaged city level stakeholders on the issue of climate change resilience in 10 different cities. We wanted to make resilience tangible because there weren’t many examples of how to build urban resilience, and not many locally embedded professionals, who had experience with it. In addition to developing expertise, there was always an ambition to replicate or facilitate new financing streams for urban resilience. Cristina Rumbaitis del Rio, formerly Rockefeller Foundation Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network (ACCCRN) needed more practical institutional backing to achieve scale. Many other donors and leading practitioners recognised that urban climate change resilience is an emerging field. There was a need to understand common challenges, coordinate better to increase impact and identify what joint action might look like.

[The conference in Bellagio] was a serendipitous event: a lot of players were at a point in their strategies on climate change or urban evelopment where they could come The insights emerging from this story are: together. People with enough decision-making power were in the room so that the ideas discussed didn’t get dissipated after Building a shared understanding amongst 3 the meeting. Cristina Rumbaitis del Rio, diverse institutions and cultures to lay the foundation for an effective partnership formerly Rockefeller Foundation Negotiating tradeoffs within a multi-sector partnership to deliver climate resilience at scale

4

DFID’s internal preparation was crucial to strengthening organisational buy-in and informing the structure of the Trust Fund.

Using practical actions to come to a common definition for a new and complex topic

5

Finding the right language and incentives to engage multiple actors in delivering urban climate resilience

6

DFID and most other donors had exited out of urban poverty in the last 20 years, thinking the marginal dollar was better spent on rural development. That is changing as we’re learning more about rural and urban poverty measurements, costs and location of climate and disaster impacts and how urbanisation brings all of this together. Shailaja Annamraju, DFID


Key stakeholders and their roles The role of the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) DFID focused on mobilising the financial resources needed to make this partnership possible. This included a background study on Future Proofing Cities and building a compelling business case. At the same time DFID leveraged its knowledge resources around programme development and M&E. They guided the structuring of the Trust Fund and its operationalisation. In addition to DFID, the following stakeholders were interviewed for this story: Rockefeller Foundation The Rockefeller Foundation provided the conceptual thought leadership around urban climate change resilience and brought stakeholders together. We spoke with Cristina Rumbaitis del Rio, former Senior Associate Director of the Rockefeller Foundation, and the current Regional Programme Manager, Action on Climate Today. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) provides the institutional framework for the trust fund, and brokers the investments. We spoke with Sam Kernaghan and Sasank Vemuri, who are both consultants to the UCCRTF. “We brought in some know how on this issue and partners to work with. DFID brought obviously the lion’s share of the financial resources, much more than Rockefeller could ever put in, and they also brought knowledge in terms of programme development as well as around urban development. Really, they did the hard work of figuring out how to operationalize the fund. The ADB brings in the relationships, the infrastructure in terms of country offices, engineers, loan officers and government relationships that we rely on to get access to cities and develop infrastructure proposals.” Cristina Rumbaitis del Rio, formerly Rockefeller Foundation.

Timeline Preparation

Design & Planning

Implementation We’ve only just started our first real resilience planning projects in Bangladesh and Pakistan. It probably took us 18 months to get them off the ground. Sam Kernaghan, consultant to the UCCRTF

That really was a multiyear education and socialisation process to really understand how partners operate and where they’re willing and capable to innovate and depart from business as usual. Cristina Rumbaitis del Rio, formerly Rockefeller Foundation We had to make the full case for the programme in DFID. Our ambition was big on this. This was bringing together our learning and the learning of our partners. We did a stakeholder process and developed a Theory of Change. We tried to pull this together. Shailaja Annamraju, DFID The major milestones since the launch of the trust fund have been the implementation guidelines, which got finalised in May 2014 and the logframe, around which there was lots of negotiation. I also started preparing the synopsis [on resilience] when I joined. Sam Kernaghan, consultant to the UCCRTF

Rockefeller hosted a conference in Bellagio in 2009. We had been implementing a programme on urban climate change resilience in South East Asia for 4 years at that point and decided to bring together leading donors and practitioners to discuss the state of this emerging field. Cristina Rumbaitis del Rio, formerly Rockefeller Foundation

2004

2005

2006 Partnership Building

2007

2008

The Rockefeller Foundation starts work on the Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network (ACCCRN).

2010

2011

2012

The idea for the Urban Trust Fund emerges at a meeting in Bellagio organised by the Rockefeller Foundation.

Preparation

2013

2014

The UCCRTF is A resilience officially launched. synopsis meeting is held in Manila. The implementation guidelines and logframe are signed off. Projects are being funded at city level in all 7 countries. DFID establishes the internal network on urban development. The ICF enables investments in sectors and changes the variety of finance available.

DFID


2009

DFID prepares research on Future Proofing Cities.

Design & Planning

2015 The fund starts procurement of pilot contracts (9 months). Activities are occuring on the ground in Pakistan, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines, Bangladesh.

June DFID business case presented.

Implementation

Emerging insights Building a shared understanding amongst diverse institutions and cultures to lay the foundation for an effective partnership It took the partners 4 years to get the institutional sign-off within their respective organisations. For some, it was the first time they worked together. Behind the scenes, enough people believed in the project to move it forward. What helped was finding mavericks within the organisations, who have a high level of influence to champion the issue and are willing to take risks. In some organisations the more innovative, risk-taking and outward looking departments provided useful entry points during this planning and design phase. The formation of the partnership was quite long, but it was a really crucial phase as well. Before a project gets interesting for the outside world, everyone’s negotiating their interests and advocating for different approaches that might be similar. One of the key milestones for us is probably the passing of the implementation guidelines. Sasank Vemuri, consultant to the UCCRTF. It’s been a really slow process for us to pick cities: cities have to decide firmly that they want to borrow money for a project. That’s a very different commitment than a donor saying: ‘hey, we’re gonna choose cities to help you build capacity and do resilient planning’. Shailaja Annamraju, DFID. Partners had to learn about each other’s organisational culture. At the same time, each partner brought clear value to the project. They learned quickly that focusing on difference can be just as important as focusing on commonality. Understanding the operational differences between philanthropic organisations, international donors and multilateral banks and flexibility to move beyond business as usual was important for consolidating the partnership. While agreement came easily on some issues others require negotiation and compromise.


The ADB is set up to prepare and implement large ($100million loan) projects. This means that they are not as nimble or agile in funding the small, community-driven projects that some of the donors were looking for. It doesn’t mean it’s not possible, but the transaction costs are potentially high. Sasank Vemuri, consultant to the UCCRTF Rockefeller is obviously a big knowledge organisation on resilience. They want to expand their views on resilience, they’re the driving force for the push towards more knowledge and more community participation. That’s where this partnership work comes from. DFID brings a lot of credibility and pragmatism to the table. We can coax the institutions because we have a broader shareholding relationship. Shailaja Annamraju, DFID ADB needed to be at the table to really leverage their infrastructure portfolio and to make more of that infrastructure investment yield climate resilience dividends. Cristina Rumbaitis del Rio, formerly Rockefeller Foundation

Working in the emerging field of urban climate change resilience meant partners had a lot of different understandings of the concept and how it might work in practice. To dive into implementation there was a real need for internal capacity building and learning. Finding the right mix of approaches often depends on the organisational culture. The lead person at ADB started a soft socialisation process to get the urban development departments and loan officers to really understand resilience. She did it in her own way, with weekly emails to her peers to describe what resilience is about. This is a soft skill that we look at fostering. How do you communicate in the right way to the people whose attitudes and behaviours you want to change, but also, who is the right messenger for that? Cristina Rumbaitis del Rio, formerly Rockefeller Foundation. On Day 1 the donors wanted to see the Knowledge Plan for the Trust Fund. We decided that we needed Knowledge Management specialists to support us in developing this plan, and initiated the procurement process to bring them on. In the interim we worked highly informally with project officers to say: “How can we help you understand these concepts so you can bring it into your work?” Sam Kernaghan, consultant to the UCCRTF. It’s been really interesting to talk to ADB Project Officers about how they learn: a lot of it was peer-to-peer. They called their peers internally and asked questions. They don’t have a whole lot of time to read a long documents or interact with external websites. Sam Kernaghan, consultant to the UCCRTF.

Emerging insights Negotiating tradeoffs within a multi-sector partnership to deliver climate resilience at scale The partnership is driven by the ambition to deliver change at scale: scaling the number of cities that are reached; the size of the investments in urban climate resilience; and, the number of people involved in making cities more resilient. Using infrastructure loans provides a huge opportunity to achieving scale. At the same time, it also means negotiating tradeoffs and balancing short and long term goals.

The volume of money has been one of the most important enablers. With the current partnership, the Trust Fund is at about $150million. Enough for a large development bank to take things seriously: if you bring 10 million to a development bank, they won’t even notice it, it’s not even a rounding error. I think it’s a fairly large amount for a development project, but I think it was incredibly strategic and the trust wouldn’t have gotten the commitment from ADB’s management if it wasn’t for the volume of the money. Sam Kernaghan, consultant to the UCCRTF Even if you’re putting 100 million into a city, that city might have an annual spend of a couple of hundred million or so. And your money is not 100 million in a year, it’s 100 million over 7 years, across 3 cities. You need to be realistic about the amount of money that you’re pumping in and the amount of change that you can expect as a result. Sam Kernaghan, consultant to the UCCRTF As a development bank, ADB is set up to generate loans and fill infrastructure deficits. Providing grants to cities as part of loans is a new experience. Existing systems are not always fit for purpose and testing new ways of working is essential. The initial Regional Capacity Development Technical Assistance that we developed was basically a way of extracting money out of the Trust Fund so that we could get things going. We had hoped it would allow us to do more community-driven pilot projects or action research. The reality is just: if it’s not attached to a project leading towards a loan, there is much less incentive inside the bank to do that. Sam Kernaghan, consultant to the UCCRTF


Sustainable development planning needs to happen at multiple layers. If you don’t have the right players at the table early on, it’s very difficult to plan for their needs going forward. It’s quite difficult to bring someone like the ADB into a planning process that starts a year in advance, because they’re very investment driven. We’ve tried to wrap activities around this investment, so they don’t just go ahead without thinking about resilient processes and issues. Shailaja Annamraju, DFID Procurement is an enabler if you follow the path of least resistance. If you want to do something innovative, or just something that best meets what you’re trying to do, then there are barriers asking: is this really the best way forward? Sam Kernaghan, consultant to the UCCRTF

Emerging insights Using practical actions to come to a common definition for a new and complex topic While urban climate resilience is a new and emerging field, the concept of sustainable development is deeply rooted in all partnering organisations. Understanding the relation between the two concepts has helped them in tackling the more challenging questions. There are a lot of questions about what we mean by resilience. Everybody’s very much internalised the idea of sustainability, and the concept of sustainability has been mainstreamed into development organisation. The more challenging part was around the question of resilience: what is the added value of a concept like resilience as opposed to sustainable development or as opposed to climate change adaptation? Sasank Vemuri, consultant to the UCCRTF Resilience is more about building capacities to respond to changing conditions and even thrive in phases of shocks and stresses. Sustainable development is powerful because it’s reframing the development paradigm. Resilience is more of a set of capacities and systems that are needed to help people thrive in an increasingly dynamic and unstable world. Cristina Rumbaitis del Rio, formerly Rockefeller Foundation

With the Rockefeller Foundation bringing the theoretical and conceptual background of resilience, the partnership is working hard to build a common understanding and apply resilience in practice. They have learned to accept the concept as work in progress and learn rapidly from ongoing implementation of activities. The advice I’d give is to keep focused on building resilience in tangible ways, it’s a specific mindset - you have to make sure that you’re really truly building resilience in people and places in a very specific way. Cristina Rumbaitis del Rio, formerly Rockefeller Foundation


One of the core principles of resilience is iteration. Don’t get caught up in definitions too early on. Have the intention be clear, but absolutely let the process and the iterations that happen within the process define the specifics over time. This is something really interesting for a lot of development projects. You commit to a log frame at some point, right? In 6 or 7 years, things can considerably change. Adjusting the project through the course of implementation isn’t seen as a failure, right? Sasank Vemuri, consultant to the UCCRTF

The concept of urban climate resilience is permeable: different entry points all lead down different paths. The concept might be contested, but when you start explaining what resilience looks like in practice, people agree with it and understand it. Sometimes you need to forget the concept and just start doing it. Sam Kernaghan, consultant to the UCCRTF

Emerging insights Finding the right language and incentives to engage multiple actors in delivering urban climate resilience The first climate change resilience activities are now in preparation at the city level. In the process, partners focused on a whole system approach, trying to understand how each city works. Focusing on the qualities of resilience instead of its definition helped them when speaking with decision-makers within the city.

At the moment we try to go down to the city level and identify the people who need to understand the city as a system, whether it’s the mayors or commissioners or the chairmen of people’s parties in Vietnam. Everybody should feel they’re part of the system. We’re learning now who needs to understand how much about resilience. Sasank Vemuri, consultant to the UCCRTF We would never use the word resilient because I don’t even know what that would be in all languages. Talking about the qualities of resilience is much more useful when you actually deal with the project. Even then you talk about spare capacity, not redundancy. What if this fails? Do you have another source of energy? Can you backup the system with solar powered batteries? Sasank Vemuri, consultant to the UCCRTF Communities particularly in poor areas are sometimes far more resilient than we are. Rigidity is a detriment to resilience. People in poor communities usually draw on 3 or 4 different sources of income. They’re more flexible, they’re better integrated with their communities. It’s the systems in which the communities find themselves that are not resilient: infrastructure, governance, management systems aren’t flexible, integrated, redundant, or inclusive. Through that rigidity, people become affected. It’s trickle-down of the nonresilience. In 2008 there were these awful floods in Mumbai and you could see poor communities recover really fast, actually. Sasank Vemuri, consultant to the UCCRTF

Implementation at city level relies on identifying the right entry points, incentives and good leadership. Embedding incentives in the design process could strengthen projects even more. There’s the entry point of climate change: if cities are experiencing more or more intensive natural hazard events than before, they might be interested in talking about climate change and adaptation. On the other hand, there’s the entry point of rapid urbanisation. Because the city is growing so fast and the infrastructure is not keeping pace, you can talk with people about how to build resilience in terms of urban systems. The third entry point is moving from assets to systems. Engineers have been trying to make infrastructure strong, robust since the beginning of time. What we want them to think about is the wider system in which a piece of infrastructure is sitting. Sam Kernaghan, consultant to the UCCRTF The only time mayors get interested in planning and resilience is if they are disaster prone. We had to bring disasters, planning and investments a lot closer together. Even though we’re looking at long term impacts of climate, we need some of these entry points to engage at city level. The real prize is also looking at resilience not only through a disaster lens but also from the point of view of economic development. Shailaja Annamraju, DFID Imagine talking to a mayor who’s interested in getting a new road. You’re thinking about the displacement of communities and the livelihoods of people who might be losing their shops. You have to find a way to get him enough of what he wants so he can help you with the other issues. How do we incentivise people and help them achieve their own goals through us achieving ours? Sasank Vemuri, consultant to the UCCRTF At the same time, cities proved to be at a suitable scale to achieve practical impacts on climate resilience. What makes urban resilience different is that it is actually possible to have really good case studies and learning at a city level. It’s the right scale. Political will matters. You get the mayor, the planning people, the municipal corporation on board and you’re a long way ahead in planning [resilience] into investments. Building resilient cities is actually possible if you have good leadership. Shailaja Annamraju, DFID


Perceived outcomes Resilience is becoming part of the new thinking in the ADB and its partners and it’s trickling down to the city level, city governments, government officials. To take one example that has come through the ADB pipeline: Vietnam has decided to do sand dune restoration in one of its cities because it’s increasingly facing storm surges and saltwater inundation, and they realised that if they don’t protect that ecosystem, they are going to have neither protection nor tourism. As part of an infrastructure loan programme they have actually embedded a soft measure: ecosystem restoration. Cristina Rumbaitis del Rio, formerly Rockefeller Foundation

Designing these partnerships takes a lot of energy and others recognise that. Therefore our design ended up bringing in more donor money to the table. The same week DFID approved the fund, USAID joined regionally. They agreed to plonk $5million in including co-finance some of the investments. For some of the work in Vietnam and Pakistan ADB is providing additional resources at country level. One year on, Swiss SECO corporation came in with $10million. The French AFD pretty much co-financed the Myanmar work even before it started. This is what we wanted to be doing: build a partnership, get people to harmonise around good investments in the region. Shailaja Annamraju, DFID

Questions for reflection 1

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How do we communicate to the people whose attitudes and behaviours we want to change? Who is the most effective messenger?

How is resilience different from sustainable development and climate change adaptation?

How do you do adaptive programming with partners?

How do we measure progress towards these ambitious urban climate change resilience targets?

What are the differences between resilience infrastructure and resilient cities?

How do you get city planners and investors to the table and align the different timeframes?

Closing thoughts It’s about those capacities and qualities that enable you to manage disruption. Resilience is highly complex and we don’t quite understand how to implement it or make it work for us. You’ve got to keep that sustainable development objective in mind at all times, taking into account the short term and long term view. I do struggle with the question of development outcomes versus sustainable development outcomes. At what cost do we choose?

Increasingly, ADB staff talk confidently about the concept and engage with their counterparts whether they are government or non-government organizations on the ground. Most of these didn’t know anything of resilience when they started talking to us about funding for their projects. Sam Kernaghan, consultant to the UCCRTF

About

This story is part of the DFID’s sustainable development learning dialogue. As part of the dialogue we spoke to 5 stakeholders about their experiences and perceptions of building urban resilience in Asia. This is the story we heard. All stakeholders helped us review the story and quotes before publishing it. For more information and to participate, go to www.sddialogue.net. 27 Learning about implementing sustainable development in practice

Sam Kernaghan, consultant to the UCCRTF

Story contacts

Shailaja Annamraju, [email protected] Website: www.adb.org/documents/establishment-urban-climate-changeresilience-trust-fund-under-ufpf

Fighting chronic food insecurity

Fighting chronic food insecurity The story of the Productive Safety Nets Programme in Ethiopia (2005-2015) Food insecurity has been constant in rural Ethiopia and climate shocks have led to severe droughts and food shortages. To address the crisis, the government initiated a series of conversations that led to the launch of the Productive Safety Nets Programme (PSNP) in 2005. Supported by DFID, the World Bank and other donors, PSNP provides small but predictable transfers of cash or food to millions of vulnerable people to help them cope with a variable and changing climate. Most recipients receive transfers as wages for work on environmental and community projects that help rehabilitate natural resources and build resilience to climate change impacts. The insights emerging from this story are: Integrating climate resilience into social protection programmes to improve livelihoods

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Investing in strong donor coordination to build a partnership that delivers at scale

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Designing adaptive management instruments that are able to meet changing local and regional needs

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Using early evidence and evaluation to learn quickly and improve programme design

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Building capacity with reliable implementation structures that are government owned and deliver at scale

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Planning short-term programme iterations to achieve a long-term, government owned vision

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Context

Key stakeholders and their roles

Three-quarters of Ethiopians are dependant on small-scale rain fed agriculture. A further 10% earn their living from livestock. In 2002/03, an estimated 14 million people needed assistance as a result of extreme droughts. The government made an ambitious commitment to find alternative solutions to the underlying causes of the problem. They brought together a coalition of donors, who also wanted to overcome the need for emergency food aid year after year. Together, their aim was to work towards a longterm development response.

The role of the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) DFID played a critical role in shaping the policy of government of Ethiopia on food security. We were probably the first donor to say: ‘We need to find a solution for the chronically food insecure population, and an emergency response is not the right mechanism for those people’. That was clearly stated in our country assistance plan in 2002. Melkamnesh Alemu, DFID.

Under Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, there were a number of consultations between the major food response partners who said: ‘we’re back to square one. What we’re doing is we are saving lives but not livelihoods. We need to break the boom and bust cycle of small scale rainfed agriculture’. Wout Soer, World Bank. After 30 years of annual humanitarian responses in Ethiopia, it became clear that the international community and the government were responding to a chronic and growing drought problem. The Government of Ethiopia realised that business as usual was not working. They wanted to move from an emergency response to a more developmental response to address the root causes of vulnerability. Kelly Johnson, Donor Coordination Team. DFID funded a pilot cash transfer programme in North Wello with Save the Children, UK prior to PSNP. Chronic food insecurity was widespread and required intervention at scale. It is also an equity issue. There is a narrative around here that if you’re going to do something, you’re going to do it big, and you’re going to do it everywhere there is need. Melkamnesh Alemu, DFID.


PSNP is a flagship programme for DFID and the donor coalition, comprised of 11 partners, including the Ethiopian Government. Melkamnesh Alemu was part of the DFID team who worked on the inception and early phases of the programme, which lead the policy transition from food handouts to money transfers. Tim Conway and Ayuba Sani are currently working on the longer term vision for PSNP to become a fully government owned and funded social protection instrument by 2025. In addition to DFID, the following stakeholders were interviewed for this story: Donor Coordination Team – Kelly Johnson, is the head of this team, responsible for organising the programme donors and structuring the partner dialogue. As the donor coordinator for the PSNP, I lead a team of 8 people, housed within the World Bank, who are responsible for organising the donor working group to come up with unified positions and uniform support to the Government of Ethiopia. Kelly Johnson, Donor Coordination Team. The World Bank – Sarah Coll-Black is the PSNP Task Team Leader at the World Bank. I lead the team of people that oversee the World Bank’s contribution to the Ethiopian Government. We also manage resources on behalf of other donors. Sarah Coll-Black, The World Bank. Wout Soer was Sarah’s predecessor until 2013 and was the also the first Donor Coordinator. He started work on the programme in 2006 and then moved from the Donor Coordination Team to the World Bank team in 2009 as Task Team Leader. He remains heavily involved in the programme as part of the World Bank Team.

Timeline Emergency People would sell the few assets they had (e.g. cattle) to get enough food but were left in a downward cycle in to chronic poverty Tim Conway, DFID.

Inception & Initial Design

2003

In 2007, the Government increased the transfers to respond to food price inflation and ensure parity with food transfers. This is somewhat unique in African cash transfer programmes: they don’t often have inbuilt mechanisms to respond to inflation. Sarah Coll-Black, World Bank. The donor coordination is supported by a multi donor trust fund that those partners give money to. We provide targeted technical assistance support to the government and undertake robust impact evaluation every two years. Kelly Johnson, Donor Coordination Team

2004

2005

2006

Programme developments

Government convenes a multi-stakeholder technical committee to explore bold new solutions.

Technical committee analyses most appropriate forms of assistances. Food Security Strategy Paper is developed with the government.

PSNP targets 5 million people. Food Security Coordination Unit is established. Risk mitigation team helps manage payment transfers.

Donor activities

DFID’s country assistance plan includes objectives to respond to chronic food insecurity.

Donor Coordination Team is established. Three months technical analysis is carried out to help inform new response.

Donors create and MoU with core principles to strengthen management and coordination of 11 partners. Donor funding is disbursed.

Emergency

Consolidation (PSNP 2)

With participation from international agencies, donors, civil society, and the government–The New Coalition For Food Security In Ethiopia – developed the comprehensive Food Security Programme. Safety Nets were one of the components of the Food Security Programme. During the design of the PSNP in 2003/04, we tried to answer several questions: what are the key principles? Where and how many districts should be covered? How many people should be targeted? What is the targeting criteria? What type of support should we give? How do we provide that support? What is the institutional arrangement? Who should lead in government? How can we as donors support that process and develop the institutional arrangement to engage with the government. Melkamnesh Alemu, DFID.

In 2002/03, there were about 14 million people needing emergency assistance. It was a critical stage. Even if we had the resources, we didnt have the logistical capacity to deliver food aid to that many people. Melkamnesh Alemu, DFID.

2002

Transition (PSNP 1)

Inception & Initial Design

Evaluation and learning is gathered. Significant programme retargeting and expansion to the Afar region.

Transition (PSNP 1)


2007 Cash transfers and public works elements are further developed.

By 2008/09, we had already started discussing what the second phase of the programme should look like. In 2008, we knew what worked from the evaluation of the first phase. We knew what additional components needed to be included in the second phase. The early start of the discussion allowed sufficient time for designing the second phase, negotiating on key principles and approval for funding from donors including DFID. Melkamnesh Alemu, DFID.

We saw some results after 2 years, but we saw exponentially better results after 4 years and then again we saw exponentially better results after 6 years. It’s not a linear process. We would never have got to the 10-year results, where we’re seeing this dramatic decline in food insecurity if we hadn’t stayed the course for the full 10 years and if we hadn’t engaged with the government around our learning from the monitoring missions to incrementally improve the delivery of the programme. Sarah Coll-Black, World Bank.

In 2008, we actually used the risk financing for the very first time. We used it again in 2009 and 2011. You’ll remember there was quite a drought in the Horn of Africa. It really proved its worth through those periods of stress. Sarah Coll-Black, World Bank.

2008 Pastoral pilot programme starts and the first use of the Risk Finance Facility occurs.

2009

The PSNP now services 8 million people in 318 rural woredas (districts). It targets the most chronically food insecure and drought affected places in the country-it’s the first line of response to any disaster. Kelly Johnson, Donor Coordination Team

PSNP addresses both the core problems and helps respond to crises when they hit. It’s scaled up and out a number of times. Currently, Ethiopia is facing a 1 in 30 year drought. The scale of the need is gigantic and they are currently trying to figure out how all of the various pieces of the puzzle will work together to respond. PSNP has already given transfers over the summer to an additional 617,000 or so beneficiaries, in the highlands, to support them and their food needs due to failed rains. Kelly Johnson, Donor Coordination Team.

2010

2011

Evidence gathering and appraisal. New proposal initiates public works, for climate change, as a condition for the receipt of cash transfers.

The Government increases its commitment and investment towards the PSNP programme.

Donors review evidence to shape what the programme should look like. DFID carries out its own appraisal.

Donors revise and draft a new version of the MoU, signed by the Government and Donor Partners in Feb 2010.

Consolidation (PSNP 2)

Systems Building (PSNP 4)

Integration (PSNP 3)

2012-14 Government policy for social protection and disaster relief is established in 2012. Govt funding is put into the programme.

Integration (PSNP 3)

2015-20 Work begins on long-term vision for the government to fully own and finance the programme by 2025. Donors begin implementing the 4th iteration of the PSNP programme aiming to further integrate into Government systems.

Systems Building (PSNP 4)

Emerging insights Integrating climate resilience into social protection programmes to improve vulnerable livelihoods PSNP has proven the potential for a social protection programme to use public works to achieve a demonstrable impact on environmental rehabilitation and climate-proofing agricultural production – as the basis for improving livelihoods. Public works is a government-run initiative whereby vulnerable people receive their transfers (of food or an equivalent value of cash) as ‘wages’ for their work on environmental protection and community projects. In that unpredictable rainfall has been a key driver of poverty and vulnerability in Ethiopia, the PSNP has been intimately and intrinsically concerned with climate vulnerability from the outset. For the first seven years, however, this was implicit rather than explicit, and primarily concerned with helping households adapt to climatic shock and stress. In recent years, however, it has become apparent that soil and water conservation through PSNP public works makes a major contribution to climate change mitigation, by sequestering atmospheric carbon in soil and biomass. From 2012, a DFID-funded initiative has helped to quantify and document both the adaptation and mitigation benefits, and to identify changes to programme design to maximise these effects.

Public works projects are about soil and water conservation; the construction of health posts nearer to or additional classrooms next to the village; feeder road constructions; and, general infrastructure development. These have significant contribution to climate change adaptation and mitigation. Public works has changed the landscape significantly within three years. Not only that, in some places the ground water level has increased. Some farmers have reported water springs that died long ago have started coming up and they have more beehives than before. Melkamnesh Alemu, DFID. The vast majority of beneficiaries receive support in the lean season in exchange for public works on sustainable land management1. They have helped improve the productive capacity of land with water harvesting and with ‘re-greening’ pastures, which has a significant impact on carbon capture and storage, both above and below ground. Kelly Johnson, Donor Coordination Team. 1 - Some households, without able bodied labour, receive cash transfers without doing public works.

By its very nature, PSNP has always been tackling climate change, it’s only that it wasn’t discussed as such from the outset.


The focus on food and water conservation and transforming the natural environment has been there since 2005. We call it ‘climate proofing’ but it’s essentially climate resilience. We’re treating watersheds in a very systematic way and they are rejuvenating. The water tables are coming back, so people have the basis for their livelihoods. Sarah Coll-Black, World Bank. The Danish and British Governments funded an initiative to look at different ways PSNP could be more climate smart. The resulting lessons are now being folded into water shed management guidelines, not just for PSNP, but for the entire country. This will impact the decision-making around what public works will be done. We have evidence about carbon capture and storage of the PSNP public works, in a variety of locations. This sets the Government of Ethiopia up to be able to appeal for green climate funding, potentially, which helps increase the sustainability of the programme. Kelly Johnson, Donor Coordination Team.

We have tried to collectively position PSNP with respect to climate resilience and poverty reduction, by saying: ‘yes, this is how you protect a vulnerable, rural population from an increasingly variable climate and how you can sequester carbon dioxide at the same time, while potentially getting some money for it. Tim Conway, DFID.

Emerging insights Investing in strong donor coordination to build a partnership that delivers at scale Collaborative working takes time and considerable effort, especially when facing the task of tackling chronic food insecurity. From the beginning, PSNP made a genuine attempt to build a partnership between all major development organisations in the sector. It was considered the only way to build confidence: the problem was so vast everyone needed to feel able to act. Around the same time, international talks at the 2005 UN World Summit–resulting in the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness–called for stronger donor coordination to start bridging the gap between development and humanitarian aid. A common denominator was the insight that this problem is too big and complex for any of us to deal with separately. We tried to work in a partnership model that could be more efficient and effective than what had been done in the past. Without that, it is unlikely that development partners would have supported the PSNP as it aims to address a complex developmental challenge where you don’t see changes overnight. Building such an ambitious partnership was only possible by creating a process where everybody felt included and could play their part. That created enough confidence that things were going in the right direction. Wout Soer, World Bank. With a strong case to work in partnership, the donors had to figure out what tools they needed to start responding collectively. It became apparent that there were some big differences between the donors themselves and the government. Tense discussions in the very early stages were then effectively structured and led by the Donor Coordination Team. For large-scale, national-type programmes, you need to invest upfront in partnerships. Coordination is not something that happens automatically. One of first things that happened in this programme, was the decision to invest in a coordination team whose function is to make sure that everybody is aware of the same processes, has access to the same amount of information, and can represent development partners in a dialogue to facilitate more structured engagement with the government. Wout Soer, World Bank. The PSNP has always been a harmonised programme supported by multiple donors. The need for support was identified quite early on. The donors agreed to hire someone who would run around among the donors, and be included in meetings and facilitate common policy decisions. That person has grown into a Donor Coordination Team of 8 people. Sarah Coll-Black, World Bank. You had this team that could go along to the different partners, discuss, debate and try to bring partners together to continue and structure the dialogue. Wout Soer, World Bank.


Coordination was not a by-product of the programme; it was a fundamental part of it. A considerable amount of time, effort and resources have been put into making PSNP an effective partnership. A lot of the partners have a strong presence on the ground, so they are able to engage regularly. To partner with the PSNP, people agree to a fairly heavy meeting schedule... I average 30 to 35 hours of meetings a week. I’d never thought I would spend so much time in meetings in my life, ever. But, it’s necessary to build partnerships and trust. Investing in one channel–the Donor Coordination Team–is a more effective use of their resources and time rather than each agency trying to work separately with the government. Kelly Johnson, Donor Coordination Team. An MOU was agreed early on to help align the motives of various partners and identify any organisational red tape upfront. More effective collaboration and decision-making has been achieved by agreeing the principles on how the partners work together. It allows for a certain degree of compromise, while maintaining levels of commitment and respect. As the programme grows, becoming larger and more complex, technical discussions must avoid jargon to help build a common understanding. PSNP has addressed some potential tensions between donors by having a set of principles that everyone signs on to through a memorandum of understanding. When we face tensions, we can go back to those principles and discuss the programme. By articulating them at the beginning, we have a mechanism which helps us all collectively prioritise, acknowledging at times, this will be easier than others. Kelly Johnson, Donor Coordination Team. Both local staff and the international staff were very committed to the course. I remember discussions until very late sometimes when we needed to come to agreement on difficult issues. We brought very strong technical expertise as a group, a willingness to support the government, the ability to compromise. If something was a risk for DFID or the European Commission, we discussed the benefits and how we mitigate those risks. The government would generally respect the points we raised as donors. Melkamnesh Alemu, DFID. Donors take turns to speak on behalf of the others when we have a meeting with the government. Before the meeting we share ideas and agree on key messages or positions. We disagree sometimes because each donor has different structures, mandates and politics. In general, it works very well. Melkamnesh Alemu, DFID.

Emerging insights Designing adaptive management instruments that are able to meet changing local and regional needs A flexible and adaptive management instrument to distribute small cash payments has made it possible for PSNP to scale up and out in response to a range of needs. When longer dry seasons or unexpected shocks occur, the programme can expand its reach to extend transfers to additional people affected by the crisis. Starting at scale, however, was a bold decision for a social protection programme to make. The PSNP went to scale immediately. There’s often a storyline around pilots to figure out how to do it. Often, pilots seem to get stuck in that piloting phase. I think partly because we’re trying to get perfect at a smaller scale. Whereas if you immediately go to scale, you’re forced to fix it as it goes because then the risks associated with just stopping are too great. The PSNP engaged in this process of figuring out what the problems were and fixing them. If we had piloted the programme, we never would have done it, because there were so many problems. Sarah Coll-Black, World Bank. Part of the appetite for going to scale is because of the annual humanitarian appeal for an average 5 million people in Ethiopia. This is not an emergency it’s chronic food insecurity. There was no experience with cash transfers at scale, other than small NGO initiatives. This enabled the government and the donors to say we’re going to address chronic food insecurity at scale and we will use a different mode of implementation. Melkamnesh Alemu, DFID. PSNP implemented the rapid response mechanism that reviewed implementation across the programme every quarter. The programme also has the ability to adapt and respond to variations in context. It can accommodate different levels of climate shock: scaling up or down based on the number of people in need, with help from risk financing; and distribute variable cash transfers to reflect differences in local food prices. Through the rapid response mechanism, we visit selected districts every quarter to see programme implementation, identify problems and provide solutions on the spot. If there are issues which can’t be resolved by the team, then they raise them at the highest level. Melkamnesh Alemu, DFID. We covered about 5 million people every year but during the same period there were about 2 to 3 million more people who needed emergency assistance. A risk financing component was included in PSNP 2, to expand support when it’s needed and shrink when the need is not there. That’s being flexible, using an adaptive approach. Melkamnesh Alemu, DFID.


We have increased flexibility in the delivery of Safety Nets to better respond to the differences across regions and districts in Ethiopia. Originally the cash transfer value was uniform. In the last 5 years, we have introduced variable metrics where we pay people different amounts depending on where they live to reflect variations in the local prices of food. We allow flexibility in delivery to better respond to how long ago food insecurity manifested in different areas of the country. Sarah Coll-Black, World Bank. When PSNP began, the initial design focused on the highland areas; the lowlands weren’t included. Both the highland farming and and lowland pastoral communities are highly dependent on climate for their livelihoods. In the highland areas in Ethiopia, the majority of people are smallholder farmers. They are in one place all year round and are deeply and directly dependent on rain. The highlands are more densely populated than the lowlands in Ethiopia. In the lowlands, people are usually pastoralist. They move around and rely on livestock for the bulk of their livelihood. When rain is inadequate, it affects crop production. As a result, female animals will produce less milk or fail to reproduce, livestock may die, and generally your herd size will diminish. Over time, the poorest households in the pastoral areas become much less likely to recover from droughts because their animals become weaker or they lose their herd. They might even fall out of pastoralism, and there are few viable alternative livelihoods available. It is a more indirect impact of drought, but it is quite serious, all the same. Kelly Johnson, Donor Coordination Team. The new phase of PSNP has recognised the differences in the way these two parts of the country work. Public works can now be implemented whenever it best suits in the calendar year. We expect to see that in pastoral areas the timing for public works will shift to recognise that people are not in one place for 6 months straight. In many of the pastoral areas, the programme also provides food, not cash. This year we will start providing cash in some pastoral communities that have requested it, as their markets have grown sufficiently robust and their beneficiaries would like to receive cash now. Kelly Johnson, Donor Coordination Team.

Emerging insights Using early evidence and evaluation to learn quickly and improve programme design The donors were willing to adopt an approach of learning and incremental change. It’s okay if it’s not perfect today, we’re going to work with the government to make it perfect over time. There are other countries, other donors, and other contexts that want perfection from the beginning. Sarah Coll-Black, World Bank. PSNP adopted an incremental change management process. There was a sense of willingness to operate in an imperfect world. They got going as soon as the design was good enough and a number of issues had to be sorted out while the process was ongoing. The partners couldn’t expect everything to work straightaway. Instead of blaming each other, the government and the donors decided to adopt a learning by doing approach. The design of the programme is the starting point–not an end point. There has to be flexibility to adapt the programme to lessons you learn during implementation. This is not always easy to manage. We have a tendency to try to fix things and to put in place targets that then become a goal in itself, without taking a step back and looking at whether the situation is slightly different than we thought originally. Those original targets are maybe not that important. If we said we would cover a million people this year but in reality we’re only going to cover 750,000, it’s not easy to say that’s good enough. There is a tendency to say: ‘we have to get the million, otherwise we are doing a bad job’. Sometimes 750,000 in this context is actually brilliant, because our initial assumption was wrong. You need to make an adjustment in your perception of what success or failure is. Wout Soer, World Bank. For PSNP, it’s been critical to put a rigorous, independent impact evaluation in place to learn from at the very beginning. Every two years, we have a big evaluation that covers about 3,000 households. It’s become the basis of decision-making with the government. Sarah Coll-Black, World Bank. In the impact evaluations everyone saw that it wasn’t just about providing transfers, it was about getting them out regularly and predictably. As a result, there were noticeable drops in the food gap when implementation improved based on those findings. Impact data feeds a reinforcing circle. Kelly Johnson, Donor Coordination Team. Every 6 months there is a two-week joint-review mission. One week in the regions and one week at federal level to debate and dialogue: Where are we with the programme? What is going well? What is not going so well? Where do we need to make improvements? To do that every six months over a period of ten years is a phenomenal achievement. The review has contributed strongly to keeping the dialogue open and dynamic and generated a lot of information for each of the participants on where are we in reality. Wout Soer, World Bank.


There’s a big joint review that comes out of the World Bank dialogue. Every one of the six regions spends a week, involving people from the district, the regional office, the NGO implementing partners, and some people from the Federal government. Everyone comes to Addis Abba for another week where we have output working groups on public works, on the transfers and on capacity building. It’s incredibly intensive. It takes up a huge amount of time, but it is quite productive. It’s a great way of pulling in a massive range of programme stakeholders. It allows us to triangulate everybody’s views and experiences, and seeing where we are. It’s not always very smooth, but it’s a very interesting way of monitoring the programme and agreeing on what needs to be done. Tim Conway, DFID. PSNP has an impact evaluation component and several studies conducted to inform and improve programme implementation. Bringing facts from different regions in the half-yearly review missions is key to learning by doing. It’s a big undertaking that requires lots of preparation. Over time it is one of the things which helped us to adapt and be flexible on the implementation process. Melkamnesh Alemu, DFID. In some aspects of the programme, PSNP had to change the way they looked at certain processes altogether. Moving to a systems approach has been a crucial step: PSNP has evolved from a basic Safety Net that is addressing food insecurity to a comprehensive social protection system. For example, PSNP implemented lessons from the CGAP/Ford Foundation graduation model, which developed a comprehensive support formula on graduating the ultra-poor out of chronic and vulnerable poverty. Using this PSNP aims to help recipients improve their situation overtime and exit the programme confidently–no longer needing social assistance. However, the rate of change has been slower than expected. Complimentary to the Productive Safety Net Programme, the Government with the support of development partners, developed a household-asset building programme that was a successor of the other Food Security Programme implemented during the first phase of the PSNP. They have been brought under one management umbrella now. Mainly in order to ensure that the internal coordination can be fine-tuned in such a way that these services are delivered at the same time in a logical sequence to the recipient households. Wout Soer, World Bank. If there is a shock that’s larger than usual, then they may need some temporary support that comes in a timely and quick fashion to prevent them from undertaking what we call negative coping mechanisms, where they’re selling off assets which makes them more insecure in the future. Kelly Johnson, Donor Coordination Team. The government planned that at the end of the first phase, 5 million people will graduate out of chronic food insecurity, but the graduation rate was very low. We presented the evidence from the programme and international experience, and discussed the consequences of premature graduation. Gradually, all stakeholders agreed on the need to invest more in household asset building. If we didn’t put this together with the Safety Net it will be difficult to graduate from chronic food insecurity at scale. Melkamnesh Alemu, DFID.

Emerging insights Building capacity with reliable implementation structures that are government-owned and deliver at scale Creating structures and instruments that get transfers out quickly, reliably and predictably at scale was one of the big challenges the programme had to overcome. There were problems with implementation capacity. We were delivering a large scale Safety Net Programme through a government system that wasn’t designed for this. At one point the cash and the food transfers weren’t going out fast enough. We realised there weren’t enough cashiers and accountants in the finance office at the district. Another time, the banks didn’t have enough liquidity. This has improved over time as staff at all levels trained on the programme implementation modalities started to understand the importance of timely and predictable transfers. Melkamnesh Alemu, DFID. Supported by the donors, the government did everything they could to develop the structures they needed to be responsive. Clear priorities were identified, and one set of agreed mechanisms was developed for everyone. One of the key principles of the programme was to ensure that people are getting the transfer on time and they know how much and for how long. Melkamnesh Alemu, DFID. All PSNP money is kept in a single bank account because of the different funding cycles and the implications for cash flow. If you say certain money can only go to these people in this region, the whole thing gets messed up. We also have one monitoring system; one financial management system; one auditing system. That’s a necessary requirement if you’re going to operate a programme at scale. Sarah Coll-Black, World Bank. Using a phased approach, the donors helped the government build capacity. Now in the systems building phase, the programme is on course to become a national social protection service that the government will own and finance. Within the coming 10 years we want to gradually move the programme from a predominantly donor-financed initiative to a fully government-financed initiative. We have agreed a 10-year transition with the government to transform this programme into a proper national, social protection system, financed from the national budget. We’ve seen a number of big policy changes in the past 5 years including the social protection policy and the disaster risk management policy. They created the platform for the dialogue to gradually phase out the development-partner assistance. That was a major milestone, and a change in thinking on the government side. Wout Soer, World Bank. Ethiopia is unique in its history in humanitarian relief, it has a functioning government committed to delivering services to the poor. There was a collective belief that if you put money in at the top of the system it would come out at the bottom, and it did. Sarah Coll-Black, World Bank.


Planning short-term programme iterations to achieve a long-term, government owned vision The ability of the PSNP partners to stay focused on the medium- to long-term impact they want to achieve has distinguished the programme. The partners haven’t been discouraged, or changed course, when short-term indicators didn’t turn out as well as expected–regenerating the vulnerable lands and livelihoods people depend upon requires a commitment much longer than 3-5 years. This type of complex, long-term change process depends on fierce determination and perseverance, combined with constant evaluation and continuous, incremental change. Planning short-term blocks within a long-term vision that’s set by the government has been crucial. In terms of process, one of the things I would say is the importance of strategic patience. By 2010, results started to emerge. By 2012, it was really clear that PSNP was having a big impact. I think if you want to do things at scale, you have to learn rapidly: but sometimes you also have to have the institutional courage to stay the course and give yourself and partners time to work through the big challenges. Tim Conway, DFID. Ten years is unheard of in development. We’ve been doing the same thing for 10 years here: processing incremental change, slowly improving the delivery of the programme. It’s a huge programme. It operates nationally, it always has. It provides support to on average 8 million people. The fact that the partners’ attention span has stayed for 10 years has allowed the programme to deliver a decline in food insecurity. We never would have gone to that point if the donors had stopped after 3 years. Sarah Coll-Black, World Bank.

A lot of things cannot be measured in 2-3 years. Having a longer vision for programming is very important to seeing successful change, particularly for safety nets. If you look at the first world, we have social safety nets that people can be on for a lifetime. Kelly Johnson, Donor Coordination Team. If we would have added the traditional project mindset, we would have said after 3 or 4 years: ‘not very impressive, next.’ That would have been a major mistake. This is a very complex, large, long-term change management process. We got where we are now by accepting that and saying: ‘okay, let’s chip away at this a little bit more and then see where we end up’. Looking back at where we are now, nobody could have predicted that this process would go as far as it has gone. Wout Soer, World Bank. The increasing complexity of our responses is also an indication that we’re starting to do our job well. The basic problems are now being dealt with or are run appropriately by the government, they no longer need our technical expertise. Now we are looking at second and third generation issues that are by definition more complicated. That’s not a bad thing–that’s a good thing. It means that things are improving. Kelly Johnson, Donor Coordination Team.

Perceived outcomes

Questions for reflection

The government is now financing the PSNP for the first time. They historically financed the other parts of the Food Security Programme and the donors financed the PSNP. This demonstrates how staying the course has resulted in something that is sustainable in the long run. The government is now committed to putting a social protection system in place, it’s going to take them many years. They’ve asked the donors to stay the course with them so that they have the time to bring their financing on stream in a way that they can find it affordable. Sarah Coll-Black, World Bank.

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How do you make long term programmes work and at what scale?

How can we be more responsive and deliver impact in the face of a more uncertain climate?

Is there a role for the private sector in social protection?

How can climate resilience be more explicitly built into social protection programmes?

How can we collaborate as donors to distribute funding at scale and pace?

The evaluations are really powerful. They use rigorous methodologies to establish the causal effect of including food insecurity for example. There’s recent analysis of the World Bank that includes PSNP as one of three main drivers behind the dramatic decline of poverty in Ethiopia. That kind of evidence demonstrates why 10 years of such a programme is important if one doubts whether 10 years is too long. Sarah Coll-Black, World Bank.

Closing thoughts The scalable components show that even in a low income environment, you can set up those systems, and they will help you respond to disasters. Given the increasing strains on the humanitarian system, we need to look at alternative ways for countries to address their problems. If crisis is the ‘new normal’, then you can’t continue to respond with an adhoc programme. You need something more robust. Kelly Johnson, Donor Coordination Team.

The PSNP had a very substantial impact on households and communities: just through the financial transfer alone, it has reduced poverty by 2% nationally. That’s incredible. The public works programme is more difficult to quantify, though it also had a massive impact on the well being of rural communities–improving the landscape, building health outposts and schools, and improving roads. Kelly Johnson, Donor Coordination Team. That we still exist. The third round of 5 years with a total budget of $3.6billion is testimony to PSNP’s success. It’s amazing that we have been able to get here, and the partner group is still intact. We have convinced each other, including government, that this is a very worthwhile investment and that it needs to continue. Wout Soer, World Bank. PSNP should be proud of delivering assistance in a predictable manner to the people, not only transferring money and food, but building capacity of government, and building systems and infrastructure using a flexible, adaptive approach–generating evidence on what and how it works. Melkamnesh Alemu, DFID.

About

This story is part of the DFID’s sustainable development learning dialogue. As part of the dialogue we spoke to 6 stakeholders about PSNP. This is the story we heard. All stakeholders helped us review the story and quotes before publishing it. For more information and to participate, go to www.sddialogue.net. 36 Learning about implementing sustainable development in practice

Story contacts DFID Senior Responsible Officer: Tim Conway, [email protected] Website: https://devtracker.dfid.gov.uk/projects/GB-1-204290

Engaging the private sector to invest in renewable energy

Engaging the private sector to invest in renewable energy Key stakeholders and their roles

The story of Uganda’s GET FiT initiative (2013-2015) GET Feed-in Tariff (FiT) is a strategic response, implemented as part of the Ugandan Government’s policy, to develop a secure and affordable energy supply to support its continued economic development. It aims to address multiple barriers blocking private sector involvement in small-scale renewable energy projects (1-20MW) needed to significantly increase the country’s power generation capacity (up to 170MW). Its main feature is a results-based tariff that incentivises

private sector investment and rewards developers when they start generating electricity. Much of the work involved: coming up with standardised tariffs; procurement processes; transaction agreements; and ways to guarantee– and share–risk to ensure projects remain bankable. There have been four rounds of procurement since GET FiT formally launched in 2013. Seventeen projects have been selected and the first hydro and solar PV projects are under construction.

In addition to DFID, the following stakeholders were interviewed for this story: Electric Regulatory Authority (ERA) – Led by Dr. Benon Mutambi, we spoke to Ziria Tibalwa Waako and Isaac Kinhonhi, who are part of the team at ERA responsible for GET FiT from the Ugandan Government side, working closely with KfW and the Secretariat. KfW – Jan Martin and Stephanie Rieger at KfW, the German development bank, who played a key role in the initiation, design and implementation of GET FiT. KfW was responsible for the procurement and financial side of things, acting as an intermediary between the government and the private sector. Recently, Kathrin Käestle has replaced Stephanie and continues to work on delivery and implementation. GET FiT Secretariat – Rene Meyer led the day-to-day management of GET FiT. The independent Secretariat was responsible for co-ordinating the programme and its stakeholders, aiding the development of the tender documents and procurement process, while also providing implementation support.

The insights emerging from this story are: Adapting a regulatory framework to enable private sector engagement

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Sharing risks and rewards to attract private sector investment

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Designing innovative funding models to maximise performance

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Using renewable resources to improve livelihoods and lower emissions

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Designing a governance structure that leads to better decision-making

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Investing time in listening and building trust to develop an effective partnership

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How long-standing, committed leadership on the ground leads to better programming

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The role of the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) DFID’s Uganda office had first-hand experience of the challenges faced by the government in unbundling the energy sector and securing the country’s energy supply. DFID was an integral part of the early discussions on GET FiT and has played an active role throughout the programme. Activities include: early stage funding to get the programme off the ground; convening and aligning donor engagement at key stages of the programme; and, active monitoring and programme management. As a member of the Steering Committee, DFID also provides input on GET FiT’s strategic direction and on contractual agreements between the multiple partners. “DFID is by far the most active donor in this. They were instrumental in the design phase, and to this day they are asking the most questions - they’re taking the most significant interest in the program.” Jan Martin, KfW

Investment Committee (IC) – Vincent Kasangaki is a member of the Investment Committee, which is responsible for reviewing the project proposals submitted via the procurement process. Vincent is a Ugandan, independent expert in renewables. Private Sector Developer (PSD) – Vy Manthripragada is from KMR Infrastructure, a US company, developing a number of small-scale hydro projects approved by GET FiT.

Context

In the late 90s/early 2000s, Uganda was facing an energy crisis. Without its own energy generation capabilities, the Ugandan government had to rely on expensive imported fossil fuel-based power. The cost was prohibitive and the supply was limited, leaving Uganda with a significant shortfall in energy. Projections for the country’s economy to grow, at up to 10% per year, were being eroded. We depended on the diesel-based thermal from around 2005 to 2012 and it drained the treasury, because the government had to subsidise–we were looking at a unit costing over 30-32 cents–the end user tariff needed to be maintained to ensure affordability. ERA. All the government programmes and resources were being focused on 20% of the population who had access to electricity, at the sacrifice of the remaining 80%. ERA.


The government had begun concerted efforts to ‘unbundle’ the energy sector starting back in 2002. During the unbundling we adopted the single buyer model where private investors were invited to participate in the generation and distribution segments of the sector, with the transmission segment remaining with the government because it is capital intensive to build and reform. ERA. It took time to implement the sector reform. In 2007, the government developed a Renewable Energy Policy targeting 67% of the country’s energy from renewable sources by 2017. Attention shifted to developing largescale hydro projects with investment from China, however, power from these projects would not be available until 2020 at the earliest. This left Uganda with an immediate, short-term gap in their energy supply. The idea of utilising smaller scale renewable energy sources was conceived to create power generation capacity, across the country, more quickly and at lower cost.

Timeline ERA start to re-evaluate what’s needed

Design & Consultation

Implementation

We effectively ran an international procurement where projects were able to apply for that top-up tariff. There were three rounds of Request for Proposals. The second thing we did–which actually took most of the sweat –was to help the government put together the contract documentation for small-scale renewable energy projects. That was the power purchase agreement–all the legal agreements that you require to get a project banked in a country like Uganda. It was a very difficult process. It took more than two years to get the final structure of the power purchase agreement in place, involving the all the legal agreements and contract documentation. We did that concurrently with moving the other pieces of the puzzle forward. Jan Martin, KfW Part of the idea for GET FiT originally came from a lady who worked at Deutsche Bank, as an investment banker. Silvia had been mandated by the UNFCCC to come up with a new proposal to facilitate private sector investment into renewables. By coincidence, she took a sabbatical in Uganda and on a return trip met Jan Martin, from KfW, who thought it was a great idea. He decided to try it out in Uganda. Rene Meyer, GET FiT Secretariat

Early 2000s

2005

2006

Due to our failed efforts to attract private investors, there was a need to investigate what was happening–how adequate are the policy frameworks, the regulatory framework, the enabling conditions–as result of that, the idea of GETFiT was born. ERA

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The real starting point was when everyone decided to get on a plane to Frankfurt and spend a whole day in a workshop discussing how it could work. Stephanie Rieger, KfW

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2012

At the tail end of the programme, considering solar was one of the best innovations. Even mini hydro projects are site specific. With solar projects, you can harness the sun’s energy from anywhere. It’s clean, quiet and maintenance costs are extremely low. Vincent Kasangaki, IC

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National developments

The Ugandan Government decide to unbundle the energy sector to make it financially sustainable.

Uganda’s power sector relies on diesel-based thermal power, heavily subsidised by the Treasury.

Uganda sets out its Renewable Energy Policy. It targets of 67% of electricity from renewable sources by 2017.

The country The Government try many modalities of attracting private faces a power investors. Negotiations to build 3 large scale hydro-power crisis. There is a projects with private investors from China get underway. shortage in supply.

The energy tariff is increased by 40%.The market becomes financial viable overnight.

The Ugandan Shilling crashes against the dollar and the pound in January.

GET FiT

ERA start to identify what’s needed to create an attractive investment climate for renewables. At the same time, KfW come up with the idea of smaller scale renewables to address the energy crisis.

ERA start to re-evaluate what’s needed 40 Learning about implementing sustainable development in practice

Multi-stakeholder inception workshop is hosted by KfW in Frankfurt to initiate GET FiT.

Dispersement currencies written into the original contract have to be changed. Construction of the first mini Consultation on the Power Purchasing Agreement begins hydro plant begins in 2012 and continues into 2014.The first proposal is in September. approved in 2013. The World Bank partner risk guarantee The GET FiT is approved in 2014. model starts to be rolled out to First and second rounds of Request The Third RFP other countries in for Proposals (RFPs) go out, inviting goes out. 18 Southern Africa. micro-renewables providers of hydro, proposals are Zambia holds its biomass and bagass to tender. 17 received for hydro own inception proposals covering all 3 sources are projects only. A workshop with key received. separate solar stakeholders. RFP is initiated.

Design & Consultation

GET FiT A further 15 programme is projects are formally launched. approved. DFID funding is committed.

Implementation

Emerging insights Adapting a regulatory framework to enable private sector engagement Something wasn’t working despite the Ugandan Government’s efforts to reform the energy sector and put a legal and regulatory framework in place to attract investment from the private sector.

Over a period, we tried many different ways of attracting investors to participate in the generation segment–especially in renewables–but nothing worked. Projects would not materialise or reach financial closure. It was a problem. ERA In early 2012, Uganda adjusted the energy tariff for end users. They had not been cost reflective for years, they had even been adjusted downward for political reasons, but in 2012, the situation became unsustainable and the tariffs were increased by more than 40%. Stephanie Rieger, KfW The whole sector became more financially viable with additional generation tariffs (REFiT). Knowing the country had 5 years to wait before power from the large-scale hydropower developments would be realised, the idea of a portfolio of distributed small-scale renewable energy projects started to emerge. Willingness to engage with small-scale renewable energy developers was led by the implementation partner, KfW, working alongside ERA, who acted as the national champion. Both parties recognised the need to add additional incentives by topping up the existing tariffs to make the sector investable and guarantee a certain level of return on investment. There were other risks, however, that could bring the profitability of projects into question. Transaction costs associated with project finance for small-scale projects in emerging markets are often as high as those that are incurred for larger projects–making small projects difficult to pursue or generally unviable. Partnered with delays in the development process these costs can be crippling for both the developer and the projects. Vy Manthripragada, PSD If you have a 5 megawatt project somewhere, the government might say that’s quite interesting, but due to personnel constraints, they tend to look towards the bigger deals. GET FiT was always about the portfolio. We’re not talking about one project, we’re talking about up to 20–facilitating $400–500million of private investment–which are key for the security and affordability of supply in this country. Rene Meyer, Secretariat


Before GET FiT, Power Purchase Agreements (PPA) were negotiated individually, often resulting in poor deals for either the government or private developers. They were time consuming and incurred substantial legal costs, which considerably impaired the viability of individual small-scale projects. To overcome this, the GET FiT Secretariat, KfW and ERA worked together to create a set of standardised PPAs that were pre-approved by the government. It took nearly 2 years to get the standardised documentation in place. As a result, licenses and PPAs are now signed in few months, helping to significantly reduce the regulatory risks and transaction costs involved for individual developers. We worked heavily on pre-agreeing the feed-in tariff policies, plus the underlying contract documentation for individual projects. The fundamental framework for promoting smallscale renewable deals, including the Renewable Energy Policy and the REFiT Program was in place but it was the application of this framework to get projects signed that needed to change. I don’t know what the right metaphor would be: you have a car without wheels? We helped them put the wheels on. Jan Martin, KfW We have a standardised set of documentation in the GET FiT toolbox. This good concept was possible because we pre-consulted with the government, investors and private developers on the bankability on these documents. Rene Meyer, Secretariat In prior deals the PPA negotiation process with our lender took close to 6 months to complete. The standardised document suite including the PPA and Implementation Agreement developed by the GET FiT programme expedited our lender’s due diligence, cutting our legal costs nearly in half. Vy Manthripragada, PSD

Emerging insights Sharing risks and rewards to attract private sector investment

Designing innovative funding models to maximise performance

GET FiT was designed to share and distribute both the risks and the rewards from investing in the small-scale renewables. The programme employs risk-sharing mechanisms that facilitate investment and incentivise the private sector to deliver. The rationale behind this was to attract competent developers by ensuring they have sufficient resources to cover the cost of development upfront, reducing construction risk, while also placing equal emphasis on the end result.

The GET FiT programme distributes funding to deliver results. On one side, it delivers funding upfront to allow private developers to hedge their project construction risks and cover some of the development costs involved. This is paid once the project is constructed and ready to operate. The remaining 50% of funding is only paid when electricity reaches the grid. Small payments tailored to the amount of energy they deliver top-up the existing feed-in-tariff for an agreed period of 5 years. This funds disbursement model is one of the innovative characteristics of GET FiT.

Compared to similar programmes that exist in the sub-Saharan market I’ve been really impressed by the GET FiT programme and team. The way they have structured the grant income for the project has attracted partners and investors that may not have typically been interested in the market. Vy Manthripragada, PSD

Donors are geared towards disbursing funds. Everyone needs to hit their targets. The GET FiT tariff top-up payments are only disbursed once the projects actually produce electricity. Donors committing funding in 2013 or 2014 will only be fully dispersed in 2017 or 2018 at the earliest. Jan Martin, KfW

We are a lot more involved in this programme with regards to contractual management and procurement issues than usual. We’ve done a lot of capacity building on the way… It’s continuous. Because [KfW] entered into contracts with the developers it made the process and the programme run much faster. It would have taken very long time in the Ugandan system. Kathrin Käestle, KfW

That’s the innovative thing that hasn’t been done yet: we’re providing funding on an output basis. The government said for each kilowatt hour of electricity that a small hydro-power plant sells to us, we will pay them about eight dollar cents. GET FiT puts an additional sweetener on the table adding a bit than one more dollar cent on top. Rene Meyer, Secretariat

The GET FiT team worked hard to broker and share the risks across multiple stakeholders. As a result, the Government was more comfortable it could meet its objectives. This had other benefits too.

The GET FiT team really thought through the economics of these smaller projects and the way the funding should work. The sophistication of the structuring is very unique, and it impressed us, our board and potential investors, resulting in the development of 3 small projects over a 2-year period. Vy Manthripragada, PSDn

As a programme, I can say GET FiT was very well thought out and a very well balanced risk sharing mechanism: ‘whilst I want to incentivise you, I also don’t want you to access the money if I can’t access the electricity’. So I will facilitate you to deliver, to get cheaper financing, because you have a guarantee of 50% on cost of development. There is minimal risk in the PPA. There are clauses in the PPA just in case the grid fails and if the off-taker doesn’t respond in time. ERA We started out with this programme assuming that all the banks would require a partial risk guarantee from the World Bank. Then as we went along with projects, the market for renewables in Uganda evolved, people were able to see that the government was serious about putting a structure in place that would work and tariffs were immutable. Over time, people just realised that perhaps they don’t need an additional risk mitigation from the World Bank. Jan Martin, KfW To further mitigate risk, the GET FiT team anticipated grid connectivity issues developers may face once the power is generated. A major risk for any project–especially if the onus of building the transmission line is on the government–is completion risk, and stability of the grid. Having KfW and GET FiT’s support by way of funding and ownership has given us and our investors the comfort to move our pipeline of projects forward. Vy Manthripragada, PSD


Another risk came from changes in foreign exchange rates. DFID and KfW helped broker and agree how donor funding agreements could be altered to overcome significant foreign exchange losses caused by the depreciation of the euro against the dollar (donor funding is in euros and the tariff and premium payments are in dollars). DFID offered to help offset these losses by releasing some of their funding early, in pounds, due to the strength of the pound against the dollar. As soon as it was clear that our money was not sufficient to fund all the projects because of US$ exchange losses, it was actually DFID that came to us and said: ‘what can we do about it? Can we disburse funds earlier’? Kathrin Käestle, KfW Donors have played an important role in helping manage risks by rethinking how grant funding can be disbursed and continuing to re-evaluate this over the course of the programme.

Emerging insights Using renewable resources to improve livelihoods and lower emissions

Designing a governance structure that leads to better decision-making

Uganda wanted to attract investment and grow its economy in a way that could reduce poverty and shift their energy supply away from high cost fuels that had bankrupt the sector. In 2007, the country’s Renewable Energy Policy was developed to maximise the potential uptake of their abundant renewable resources. One of the aims behind GET FiT was to help Uganda achieve its target to generate 67% of its energy from renewable sources by 2017.

The GET FiT governance process brings multiple stakeholders together to discuss what’s needed and address challenges and opportunities as they arise. The government sits alongside the donors and implementation partners. Each key stakeholder is represented, helping to strengthen political buy-in and remove barriers to implementation. This active participatory approach was kick-started at the inception workshop and has been instilled throughout the programme’s governance structures.

There is so much potential here for renewables, why wouldn’t we try to utilise renewables as much as possible? That was clear. The objective is to increase generation in a low carbon way. Kathrin Käestle, KfW Lowering greenhouse gases was a factor, because thermal power produces more greenhouse gases than renewable energy. But that was not the main driver for government buy-in. The main driver was lower costs. Mini hydro produces power at between 8-10 cents per cost unit; thermal power costs 23-28 cents at least, in Uganda. Rene Meyer, Secretariat GET FiT started out with a tender focusing on mini hydro, bagasse and biomass energy sources. The third round of Request For Proposals (RFP) also included solar, due to concerns over the limitations associated with hydropower raised by ERA. We realised that mini-hydro plants require a specific sites where either, water falls or large volumes of run-of-the-river water flow. However, solar projects are less site-specific given our sun cover. Vincent Kasangaki, IC One of the more difficult aspects of the programme has been balancing the financial viability of the renewables projects for developers, with ensuring affordable energy for the end-user. It’s an ongoing challenge. ERA has a lot of difficulty projecting the growth of demand for electricity in this country. While there is talk that the economy has grown on the macro level, at the micro level I don’t think it has grown that much. Our biggest consumer category is domestic and yet consumption at the domestic level is falling because the majority of people are not able to afford the power. Vincent Kasangaki, IC The mix of small-scale renewables identified for GET FiT should deliver a more cost-effective, reliable source of energy. The donor funded top-up tariff makes energy more accessible to more people–however, affordability issues may persist for the poorest people in Uganda.


It was always very important to make sure that we had all relevant stakeholders in the Steering Committee, meaning the government, donors, and ourselves, to ensure that there was full political buy-in into the program, and that you would have a forum where all remaining issues could be sorted out, effectively. At the same time, you had a much more operational Investment Committee, insulated from the politics, as it were, of the Steering Committee, where you talk about strategic and sector policy things. The Investment Committee is staffed with competent people who know project finance and renewables in Africa, and can take decisions accordingly. Jan Martin, KfW The whole project approval was totally removed from any potential conflict of interest. The government’s representation has been limited to the Steering Committee, which has a consensus mandate. The Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Energy were both represented but they only have one vote, so they had to develop a joint position and align with the remaining members. Rene Meyer, Secretariat De-linking the programme from direct approval from the government minimised bureaucracy. Putting experts on the Investment Committee who do not have direct personal interest in the projects helped ensure an unbiased and efficient decision-making process. Vincent Kasangaki, IC In the Investment Committee, each prospective project is assigned to one member, who was responsible for reading all the relevant documentation, including the consultant’s assessment report, and presenting the project for consideration. Projects either pass or fail the minimum scoring threshold and all approvals are linked to further conditions, which were imposed to safeguard international, technical, environmental and social sustainability standards. Approved developers have to comply with these conditions prior to the signing of a GET FiT financing agreement. Decisions are made by consensus, considering the facts available. Only KfW has the veto right in the Investment Committee. They can say, we’re not going to do this project, whereas, in the Steering Committee, it’s all consensus. Rene Meyer, Secretariat

Emerging insights Investing time in listening and building trust to develop an effective partnership

How long-standing, committed leadership on the ground leads to better programming

GET FiT’s multi-stakeholder partnership began with a consultation process. All stakeholders, including institutional investors from the DFID side, Ugandan Government ministries, commercial banks and the developers themselves, were involved in the development of the PPA to make sure it was bankable from the outset. Since then, partners have work together and really listened to each other to navigate complex and competing demands. The GET FiT Secretariat coordinates stakeholders intentionally.

Tailoring the project to suit local conditions could not be more important. GET FiT was developed specifically for Uganda by people who have deep understanding of the local culture and context; they know the power sector and continue to be immersed in the conditions on the ground. It draws on long-standing, credible relationships held by KfW for more than 25 years and combines this with pivotal actors who are not afraid to instigate change.

As the secretariat manager, that’s my most important role. I’m somewhat the spider in the web, just trying to keep all the links together. Rene Meyer, Secretariat

The most important thing is to look at the country you are in. Look at the country’s needs, its circumstances, and pre-conditions. Everything starts with that. Jan Martin, KfW

The Ugandan regulator openly collaborated with KfW and GET FiT resulting in a strong framework that can remain in place once donors exit the market. Vy Manthripragada, PSD We then had a very cooperative and active counterpart with ERA. One of the positive windfall benefits of the programme is that they really developed this strong standing– they are somebody in the sector now–which was not the case back in 2011. We always tried to ensure that government has the feeling that they are in the driving seat. Rene Meyer, Secretariat

We had to balance the cost recovery for the developer with the desire to keep the end user tariff affordable, while also considering the risks. As we sit in this boardroom and listened to the many developers talk about what risks prevent them from progressing the projects to flotation, we heard the signals. That has informed what we have to do to be able to make an investment climate in the renewable energy area competitive. ERA It’s like some kind of jigsaw, you need different components to come together. Sometimes, when you bring together government institutions and implementation partners, one of them fails to connect. But this time everybody has come in and been willing to connect and accept each other’s stresses and timelines. Through everybody’s willingness to move together, everything has managed to move forward. ERA


You need local representation which is focusing on the project, at least something between 60 and 100 percent of the time. I would also always aim for an office with the national champion. My office is at ERA, that helped through short communication and feedback ways. Rene Meyer, Secretariat Having individuals like the GET FiT Secretariat on the ground working within a government agency to resolve bottlenecks in real time is critical. It may seem really simple, but those are the things that can change the entire system of programmes like this. Vy Manthripragada, PSD

All the key people involved understood what we were trying to achieve. They had seen private sector projects; understood some of the key bankability issues; and, were around long enough to lend their political and personal support to make it happen. Jan Martin, KfW It’s the programme that makes you passionate because it has such a big impact on the Ugandan power sector. It convinced me personally and it convinced other people that it was a good call. Stephanie Rieger, KfW My experience is that it’s a very dynamic programme and with very dynamic actors in it. I mean, everybody seems very, very committed and proactive. You really have the feeling that everybody’s owning this. Kathrin Käestle, KfW

Perceived outcomes What I am proud of is that even though it might seem long from a private sector standpoint, we’ve been able to design, and turn around this programme in an incredibly short period of time. Jan Martin, KfW Distributed power plants in remote locations help us minimise loses and stabilise voltages across the country. Our reliability improves because we stop relying on one plant and, we exploit our power potential because we increase the amount of power available. This brings social benefits, such as employment, capacity building and expertise. Vincent Kasangaki, IC At its best, each of these projects creates about 300 jobs. Of course the peak of employment is during the construction phase. When that ends, you’re left with 30-50 people who are operate and maintain the plants. Out of those, you may have only 1 or 2 expats - meaning that 29 or so are local. So the creation of jobs is greatly appreciated. ERA I don’t know if it’s possible to eradicate poverty all together. You see it really depends. In some areas it’s almost as immediate as the power starts. In others, it could be 3 or 4 years before you see any sizeable effects. Vincent Kasangaki, IC

Questions for reflection You look at the environment that has been created, the instruments that have been put in place, the confidence that has been built and I think we should be able to sustain the momentum. We are approving many permits and licences. The economic benefits can be felt. ERA

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What risks can you identify that create barriers to private sector investment?

Can risks and rewards be balanced more strategically between stakeholders?

Is it possible to be more innovative with the way you structure grant funding to attract and incentivise private sector investment?

Are there cost reductions and other improvements you can build into the process to facilitate investment and build momentum?

How can the different forms of low carbon technologies provide energy for the poorest?

The projects also come with the corporate social responsibility benefits because this is a requirement–better schools, bore holes or other access for clean water, that sort of thing. Before we issue a license, we hold a public hearing where the developer sits with the local community and they agree on the areas they want to have supported…There are even benefits at the macro level, as long as you are giving a signal to the market and investors that you have sufficient energy capacity– you improve your industrial climate. ERA

Closing thoughts This really is the first programme where KfW and the other donors have directly supported private developers to deliver renewables in Africa…To me, this is part of a much larger story. The German Government, the British Government, everybody wants to support renewables in Africa, However, we will not achieve our targets with state owned utility partners. If we want to make a real dent, we need to find smart ways to support the private sector to deliver projects. Hopefully, this is a starting point for much more private sector investment into renewables in Africa.

When you provide a reliable investment framework, people make commitments for 20 years. That’s something you don’t easily achieve in a sub-Saharan, African country. Now we realise, wow, we managed to get Uganda up to ninth place for clean tech investments globally among emerging economies. And of course you hope for spillover effects into other industries. This would be our greatest possible achievement. Rene Meyer, Secretariat

Jan Martin, KfW

About

This story is part of the DFID’s sustainable development learning dialogue. As part of the dialogue we spoke to nine stakeholders about their experiences and perceptions of the GET FiT process. This is the story we heard. All stakeholders helped us review the story and quotes before publishing it. For more information and to participate, go to www.sddialogue.net. 45 Learning about implementing sustainable development in practice

Story contacts DFID Senior Responsible Officer: Howard Standen, [email protected] Website: www.getfit-uganda.org/

Building climate resilience in the Caribbean

Building climate resilience in the Caribbean The story of collaborative climate action in the Caribbean (2007-2015) Natural disasters and climate change impacts are felt frequently in the Caribbean region, which is composed of a number of small island states. As a joint response, the Governments of fifteen Caribbean nations initiated the development of a strategic framework for achieving sustainable development resilient to climate change in 2009. After a period of comprehensive participatory planning, their shared strategic framework resulted in a series of coordinated projects, in improved alignment of national strategies and in additional donor funding. The insights emerging from this story are: Starting from local conditions and needs to develop a relevant regional strategy

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Designing a governance structure to enhance dialogue and national ownership

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Building models of success to identify and share what works

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Using climate resilience knowledge and tools to improve livelihoods

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Investing in an inclusive consultation process to build a strong foundation for implementation

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Identifying different entry points to engage multiple private sector organisations in delivering resilience and livelihood interventions

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Context For the governments of the Caribbean, the idea of combining climate change and development is an obvious choice. Especially for this region the question of its vulnerability to natural hazards is a very important part of the work and conditions we live in. Our geography is one that we can’t escape: hurricanes, seismic activity. The Caribbean is on that volcanic arc of fire if you will. That has been an issue that we have placed at the forefront of our work. Now even more so with the issue of climate change, which threatens to make that challenge even more difficult for our countries. Cheryl Dixon, Caribbean Development Bank In the early 2000’s, donors including the World Bank invested in a large number of pilot projects on climate adaptation in the region, increasing both the practical knowledge base–and the need for coordination. As more Caribbean countries moved towards middle-income status, traditional development cooperation funding dried up. This further increased incentives for regional coordination and an ambitious focus on climate change. Grenada never really recovered from Hurricane Ivan in 2004. The storm wiped out 200% of its GDP. The island has been experiencing periods of El Nino type weather events since then. Its fiscal deficits are accumulating. That makes it difficult to pursue the kind of resilience programs it wants. Dr Kenrick Leslie, CCCCC


Key stakeholders and their roles The role of the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) When DFID’s Caribbean programme underwent a strategic review, they realized that their work so far had underestimated the region’s vulnerability to climate change and disaster risk. The emerging regional process centred around the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (CCCCC), it was an opportunity to connect existing scientific models with policy work and demonstrate adaptation on a practical level. DFID took a leadership role in orchestrating donor alignment, strengthening the governance of the process and boosting project implementation capacity at the regional level. The result was an implementation plan owned by all 15 governments in the region. “DFID was one of the first donors to start to mobilise around the implementation plan [in 2012]” Simone Banister, DFID In addition to DFID, the following stakeholders were interviewed for this story: Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (CCCCC) – Dr Trotz, Dr Leslie and Dr Bynoe are assisting with the coordination of climate action across the Caribbean region. Caribsave – Owen Day and Newton Eristhee are delivering the C-FISH project under the implementation plan. They are working with local communities, national governments and private sector partners around coastal zone management. Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) – Cheryl Dixon heads the Environment and Sustainability unit at the CDB and has played a key role in mobilising resources for finance readiness activities and climate risk management tools. Sandals Foundation – Heidi Clarke coordinates this resort operator’s charitable foundation involvement in the Caribbean Fish Sanctuary Partnership (C-FISH) project. Government of Grenada – Permanent Secretary Bernadette Lendore-Sylvester helped to operationalise the strategic framework and accompanying implementation plan for her islands through two desalination plants and the C-FISH project.

Timeline Preparation

Design & Planning DFID mapped where we had some advantage or where there was interest. We also did some work on the economics of climate change and started to look at specific sectors. Simone Bannister, DFID

The implementation plan was informed by 10 years of work in the region. For instance, we started modelling to come up with region-specific climate scenarios. We had done vulnerability studies and impact studies across sectors, identified cost-benefit analysis and adaptation options. There was a tremendous amount of information that informed that process. Dr Ulric Trotz, CCCCC

In 2009, the DFID Caribbean programme focused on supporting regional programmes. But we knew we needed a mixture of both regional and national focus, especially when doing adaptation. Simone Bannister, DFID

Our work in climate change in the region started in 1997. The Caribbean governments started to take action to build their understanding and capacity on climate change, since 1997. Now, during the course of that time, their negotiations basically evolve and the Caribbean are part of the Alliance of Small Island States group. Dr Ulric Trotz, CCCCC

Late 1990’s

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2006

Policy Process

The Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (CCCCC) opens.

Local Projects

A number of government-funded pilot projects help to build early experience of climate resilient development.

Implementation

2007 October: CARICOM1 formally requests a strategic framework for achieving sustainable development resilient to climate change.

Preparation

2008

2009

The implementation plan is a product of a region-wide consultation process involving a range of stakeholders, public sector, private sector, NGOs et cetera, so that it really reflects issues that are of concern to the Caribbean populous. Dr Kenrick Leslie, CCCCC

At one point, the Cabinet of Barbados invited us. We were pleasantly surprised that they had begun adjusting their strategic plan to align it with the regional implementation plan. Dr Kenrick Leslie, CCCCC Holding all those levels together, that’s where the monitoring, reporting and verification process should also help. The countries are working on the national reporting and making sure it’s integrating within their national systems. The region is helping with overarching components so we can start looking at patterns and mapping across locations.Simone Bannister, DFID

The heads of government asked: how do we implement that program? That is where the implementation plan came in. After 18 months, it was submitted to them through COTED2. In March 2012 at their intersessionary meeting, it was approved. Dr Kenrick Leslie, CCCCC

2010

2011

2012

July: Heads of State endorse the regional framework for achieving development resilient to climate change.

CARICOM endorses the Caribbean Regional Resilience Development Implementation Plan.

The idea for the Caribbean Fish Sanctuary Partnership (C-FISH) emerges as a result of DFID-funded research.

C-FISH receives funding through the CCCCC.

Design & Planning

2013

2014

2015 CCCCC is accredited to receive funding through the Green Climate Fund (GCF).

.The C-FISH Project is established, partly to encourage the engagement of the private sector.

Implementation

1 - Caribbean Community (CARICOM) 2 - Council on Trade and Economic Development (COTED)


Emerging insights Starting from local conditions and needs to develop a relevant regional strategy

Designing a governance structure to enhance dialogue and national ownership

Coordinated through the CCCCC, the small island states of the Caribbean have developed a joint response to the impacts of climate change. After a period of experiments and pilot projects, the shared strategic framework has enabled them to articulate priority areas and an approach for addressing some of the impacts associated with climate variability and change. The 15 national governments are driving implementation, creating an enabling policy environment. Delivery partners are NGOs, private sector organisations and regional institutions closest to local communities. Aligning activities at regional and national levels remains a constant challenge for implementation.

The CCCCC was able to capitalise on fora with a direct line to heads of governments and high level decision makers at the regional level, such as the Council on Trade and Economic Development (COTED). This in turn strengthened a dialogue between governments and regional institutions, and allowed the strategic framework to reflect national priorities and regional alignment. As a regional institution, the CCCCC has a key role in navigating these political processes and getting buy-in from all stakeholders involved. Both the strategic framework and implementation plan have been designed in consultation with: national governments, members of parliament, NGOs and community organisations and private sector partners.

Before, the interventions would have come from the outside. Now we are asking: how can we help communities help themselves–given the information; given a better understanding of the processes at work; and given what you are doing for yourselves. But that is simply not enough because we have to make changes at the national level in terms of government policies because without that, it’s not going to be sustainable. Cheryl Dixon, Caribbean Development Bank

Basically all of our regional programmes are defined by national priorities. Whatever we do must have relevance to the countries. That is a very important part of the fabric. Dr Ulric Trotz, CCCCC

Trying to do all things for all countries as a regional institution isn’t always possible. In some cases we see delays because we can only move when all countries are ready. In some instances you need to start with a few. That’s been a bit tricky and that tension continues. Simone Banister, DFID


We have to ask: how can we make these programmes relevant to communities? There is always a need for an organisation to broker trust. When we go to each island they’re all different. Our approach has to change for each community and each initiative needs to change. One of the roles of the CCCCC is to provide technical policy expertise to governments, create a database of knowledge and share models of success. Owen Day, Caribsave

The heads of government asked: how do we implement that program? That is where the implementation plan came in. After 18 months, it was submitted to them through COTED. In March 2012 at their intersessionary meeting, it was approved. Shortly after that, the Cabinet of Barbados invited us. We were pleasantly surprised that they had begun adjusting their strategic plan to align it with the regional implementation plan. Dr Kenrick Leslie, CCCCC There are overlaps within the governance structures of these institutions, or in the national institutions. We need to constantly ensure that they are linking up with each other and sharing. Sometimes the traffic is one way and some of the traffic is back the other way, but it’s a constant flow of information between the two. Simone Banister, DFID

Under the Caribbean Community Secretariat (CARICOM), the COTED is the highest policy level because it involves ministers directly. Through COTED we have direct access to the endorsement of the heads of governments at their annual meetings. The COTED also has a specific role through the Prime Minister that is responsible for environment and sustainable development within the CARICOM quasi-cabinet. Dr Kenrick Leslie, CCCCC We still needed to boost both the systems nationally and regionally to be able to deliver. We’ve been cognisant whichever way you cut it; you still need both of those to grow. So how do we gear up the regional institutions to manage this? At this time the CCCCC was delivering a couple of projects and surviving on the management fees. To become a proper governing body and implementation agency they needed more sustainable structures. Simone Banister, DFID

Emerging insights Building models of success to identify and share what works To implement the strategic framework, the Caribbean region often tests interventions through pilot projects. When successful, these models can be adapted and scaled up to other contexts. Resilience interventions were often tested on one strategically selected island to capitalise on an enabling environment. Other regional governments then visit successful models before engaging in similar activities.

Using climate resilience knowledge and tools to improve livelihoods With C-FISH, we wanted to focus on creating models of success. Only when you have a model will you be able to get people’s attention; they need to see and feel. We had to be strategic about where we wanted to work. At times the government wanted to support more locations, but we pushed back. And now we have some great models of successful fish sanctuaries. Other government partners have visited the sanctuaries and now they want to do more. Owen Day, Caribsave What’s the role of these demonstration-type projects? It’s to indicate what’s possible, and then to work with governments to either change policy or to get them implemented within their respective countries. In St. Lucia a pilot project looked at demonstrating that building codes are worth pursuing. Clearly, they have financial implications because if we want persons to build to a certain standard, the costs of such buildings are likely to go up. After the project, the Government of St. Lucia changed its policy to ensure that any new hotel entity would need to put in the same technology. Based on that, it was repeated in Barbados. Dr Mark Bynoe, CCCCC One of the greatest benefits of C-FISH was that they have been so involved in being with the community and seeing what’s working and sharing from island to island. I think we’ve benefited greatly from that. Heidi Clarke, Sandals Foundationn


In the Caribbean, the livelihoods of poor and vulnerable communities are particularly climate and disaster sensitive. As implementation partners work with communities on a daily basis, they design climate interventions to make the lives of the poorest and most vulnerable more resilient, thus helping them improve or secure alternative livelihoods. Strategic plans and policies at the regional and international level reflect and build on this strong synergy: resilience and disaster risk reduction are seen as tools to more sustained livelihoods development.

People are thinking employment and medical. They’re not realising that we rely so much on the environment and there are aspects of it that we have to work on to have those livelihoods and to have that employment. Now that local fishermen are feeling the effects of not being able to catch fish, and we’re seeing what’s happening to our coral reefs, they now say: ‘hold on a second. What can we do’? Heidi Clarke, Sandals Foundationn This is a community project in Saint Thomas, Jamaica. It was interesting that they were linking degradation and vegetation loss in their communities to the fact that most of the young men had very little employment opportunities. They were all charcoal burners. They were cutting down these trees. Their community was convincing them to participate in this project in a way that would also provide them with an alternative livelihood stream and provide them with the information on the ongoing challenges that they faced: drought and extreme loss of portable water from traditional springs and so on. They required a different kind of dialogue. We’re learning. It is not as quick as one would want to move resources into these communities but working with communities, it takes time. Cheryl Dixon, Caribbean Development Bank The main occupation of our male islanders is local traditional building of boats and using them for fishing and trading. In addition, the boats are used for the staging of our annual Regatta Festivals. So we are completely dependent on the sea. For fishermen to preserve their catch and then sell high quality fish on the open market, they need ice. For that you need water. We have suffered from severe droughts in the past. The desalination plant has a strong impact on livelihoods of local fisherfolk and the entire boating sector, because it produces clean water. Bernadette Lendore-Sylvester, Government of Grenada

Emerging insights Investing in an inclusive consultation process to build a strong foundation for implementation

Identifying different entry points to engage multiple private sector organisations in delivering resilience and livelihood interventions

At a regional level, the CCCCC is drawing heavily on the iteration of the implementation plan and stakeholder consultations, to ensure strong ownership. The strategic priorities are being revised and new priorities, such as energy and health, are being added. Consultations with national governments, NGOs, community organisations and the private sector are at the core of this process. They reflect priorities and realities on the ground. We also heard from the Caribbean Development Bank, the Government of Grenada, Caribsave and the Sandals Foundation that partnerships, social engineering and participatory processes are a must to ensure the sustained impact of resilience programmes.

Particularly around coastal zone management tourism has provided a straightforward entry point for the private sector to engage in climate interventions. Vibrant coral reefs, beautiful sandy beaches, and lush natural environments make the destination that’s being sold to tourists. Sustaining that environment ensures future business.

I used to spend a lot of time developing policies and laws for marine protection. Now we’re realising we’re managing people–there needed to be a dialogue. Having the right incentives for engaging people is really important. For me, this social engineering is ecosystem based adaptation. Newton Eristhee, Caribsave

The fishermen are not pulling in the fish they used to pull in. They have to go out deeper and deeper. We’re in constant dialogue as to what’s happening in the community. What we found is that they often did not understand why these things were happening. Heidi Clarke, Sandals Foundationn

There are some other issues which are now emerging, and we’ll be working on them with policymakers. We have seen that there is a greater need for us to change the energy architecture within our region: focus more heavily on renewable energy, but also on energy efficiency. That needs to be given greater prominence. We have also recognized that there is a greater importance on the health impacts associated with climate change. That is something that we are looking at and need to articulate a bit better within our regional approaches to climate change. Dr Mark Bynoe, CCCCC

When the marine protected area was first declared there was a big tension. Change brings fear. Change brings uncertainty. Caribsave worked with the local authorities to enhance the involvement of the fishermen and this brought them on board. Whenever you want, change you have to be prepared to go down to the level of where people are and to educate them about the benefit that will come. We try to show the fishermen that creating the sanctuary for the fish means that the fish population will multiply and there will be spill over. Bernadette Lendore-Sylvester, Government of Grenada


A growing part of C-FISH has been the engagement of the private sector. The Sandals Foundations wanted to do more around community involvement and marine conservation, and their interests coincided with those of our programme. We started talking to other companies about this and we were surprised how many of them wanted to help. Their help was not providing money but providing markets that can diversify community livelihoods. We need to think more strategically how companies’ in-kind contributions can be more beneficial. The process takes time and often requires changes in the corporate culture. Owen Day, Caribsave Engagement in other sectors, for example energy, is more complex. When the risks associated with resilience projects and initial investments are too high for the private sector to get involved, pilot projects test different approaches, for example, providing specific credit lines for renewables and energy efficiency.

About 40% of the bank’s investment in the region goes to the private sector through national development banks. We started a pilot program 1-2 years ago. We provide a portion of these lines of credit specifically for renewables and to promote energy efficiency. We have twinned this with business advisory services support. There is a lot of interest because there’s a general lack of understanding about renewable energy and energy efficiency in the region. Cheryl Dixon, Caribbean Development Bank Governments in the Caribbean need to emphasize the importance of being involved in the environment and marine conservation. They need to try and drive this home to private sector and communities on whole. Heidi Clarke, Sandals Foundationn

Perceived outcomes CCCCC has just been accredited to the Green Climate Fund (GCF). That’s been a great result, not only in terms of access to finance but also in ensuring that CCCCC has proper systems and procedures in place. Accreditation requires scrutiny of accountability mechanisms, procurement systems and due diligence, and has thus created an incentive and given them guidance to strengthen their work. Simone Banister, DFID The process and this programme have had a much greater impact than just the production of 2 documents and the securing of £4.95million. We’ve been able to leverage other assistance, for example from KfW to the tune of €12.9million. We also have an EU-GCCA project which is worth €8million. The strategic framework has been used to build strong partnerships going forward. Dr Mark Bynoe, CCCCC

What I’m most proud of is that even within the bank there has been a change in mindsets. When I got there the engineers said: ‘do we need a treehugger?’ Now we have young engineers here who fully embrace the concept of gender equity. They’re big into understanding community consultations and why we need to have them, why they simply can’t go in and build a school and not talk to the community about it. A lot has changed here. Cheryl Dixon, Caribbean Development Bank


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How do we align strategies and priority areas of work at the regional and national levels?

How do all the different levels of work fit together, so they add value to one another?

How can we best resource regional institutions so they have sufficient capacity and financial sustainability?

What are promising approaches of integrating resilience, disaster risk reduction and sectoral work?

How can we balance shared risks and upfront investments to allow for a swift transition to renewable energy?

We’ve just finished our first environmental survey and we have been able to report a 250% increase in fish biomass in one of our sanctuaries. Also, we opened a little office in the middle of a fishing community, which we painted bright blue with lots of fish. There’s a lot of traffic coming there, curious what this little office is about. People want to learn about the sanctuary and about the surroundings. It’s really coming together as a partnership. Heidi Clarke, Sandals Foundation

Closing thoughts You have to believe in the possibility for success and change. You have to be willing to be engaged at every level–from the politicians who have a very short-term horizon to the residents in the community who feel that there is very little hope. You have to be willing to navigate. We have to have a longer view for these kinds of programmes and initiatives: it’s not like building a road. There are many, many interlocking parts. You have to bring these all together and be able to, at the same time, shift gears and acknowledge that isn’t working and find what might work. You have to be prepared to do it for the long haul.

A lot of the strength of the implementation plan is that it tried to capture what countries were doing and their existing priorities. In doing that, it captured a reality but it was reflecting rather than shaping that reality. If you frame it differently [you could] say, well, this is a knowledge exchange, so that we all know who’s doing what and we can compare and learn. But it would probably then be a different living document and process than an implementation plan itself. Martin Whiteside, INTRAC/CDKN impact reviewer

Cheryl Dixon, Caribbean Development Bank

About

This story is part of the DFID’s sustainable development learning dialogue. As part of the dialogue we spoke to ten stakeholders about their experiences and perceptions of building resilience in the Caribbean. This is the story we heard. All stakeholders helped us review the story and quotes before publishing it. For more information and to participate, go to www.sddialogue.net. 52 Learning about implementing sustainable development in practice

Story contacts DFID Senior Responsible Officer: Simone Banister, [email protected] Website: www.caribbeanclimate.bz


Reforming national forest governance The story of the Forest Governance, Markets and Climate Programme (2002-2015) As part of a global effort to eliminate deforestation, the European Union (EU) established the EU Forest Law Enforcement and Trade (FLEGT) Action Plan, in 2003. This consists of three strands: a) the EU Timber Regulation (EUTR) which requires importers of timber to question its legal source, b) international policy dialogues with other consuming countries and regions without similar legislation, and c) Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPAs) with supplier countries who want to trade legally with Europe through establishing a FLEGT licencing system. DFID’s Forest Governance, Markets and Climate Programme (FGMC) supports 6 VPA countries in establishing legality assurance systems that monitor, track, audit and verify the legal origin of timber and wood products. This story focuses on the work of the FGMC programme in Ghana. The themes emerging from this story are: Trade agreements leveraging developmental outcomes

3

Domestic and international concerns mutually supporting each other

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Investing in a negotiation process to deliver inclusive and deep change

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Legal frameworks as a catalyst for sustainable development action

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Demonstrating the impact of investments in open-ended political processes

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Context For decades, the international community has tried to establish mechanisms to reduce illegal logging and deforestation and improve sustainable forest management for the benefits of global livelihoods, biodiversity and the climate. We helped to foster a coalition at the European level because we wanted to have a very strong trade component. If you’re going to be serious about trade, then you have to be working at a European level; you can’t just engage as the UK alone. Julia Falconer, DFID. The aim of the FLEGT Action Plan is to close down all avenues for illegally-sourced material while establishing a mechanism to facilitate legal trade from countries with effective control systems. The VPA process requires supplier countries to establish an inclusive and deliberative process to define legality for timber between stakeholders from government, civil society and private sector, and to oversee implementation of the Timber Verification Legality System (TVLS) and forest governance reforms which emerge. Ghana was one of the first countries to start the VPA negotiations in 2006. With around 2.6 million hectares of forest reserves dedicated to timber production, the forest sector is the fourth largest contributor to Ghana’s GDP. Next to a substantial domestic market, around a third of Ghana’s timber exports are sent to the EU. The forests were going very quickly because trees were being cut illegally for domestic market use. It’s become more difficult to manage forests because of illegal activities. The government had to address illegal chainsaw milling in the forest because there was loss of revenue to the state. Alhassan Attah, former Executive Director, Timber Industry Development Division, Ghana Forestry Commission


Key stakeholders and their roles The role of the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) At EU level, the UK government strongly advocated for combining action on illegal logging and forest governance with trade. DFID have been one of the key driving forces behind the FLEGT process. EU Member States have different approaches to support countries in their negotiation and implementation process. DFID’s FGMC programme provides resources to strengthen political processes in VPA countries. The EU process is framed primarily as a trade negotiation; DFID builds on this by bringing in the poverty and climate change angles, and also by strengthening the voice of civil society organisations in the negotiation process. “The FGMC is framed around strengthening partnership agreements, working with the political space that the negotiation of those agreements creates, as well as looking at other drivers of deforestation. The entry point is always on governance and illegality as this then anchors the concern within sovereign bounds and avoids accusations of imposing external standards.” Julia Falconer, DFID. In addition to DFID, the following stakeholders were interviewed for this story: FGMC Project Management Support Team (PMST) supports programme implementation and coordination, including managing 20 accountable grants. Tropenbos, an international NGO advocating for the preservation of tropical rainforest in Ghana and elsewhere. Domestic Lumber Trade Association, an umbrella organisation for small to medium scale timber businesses in Ghana. Ghana Forestry Commission, the government institution responsible for regulating the use and conservation of forest and wildlife. FLEGT Facilitators, support and facilitate the VPA negotiation at country level.

Timeline International commitment Way back in the 90’s, people were concerned about degradation in the forest through illegal activities. The situation wasn’t as bad as maybe currently it is, and of course over the years, the situation seems to have worsened in terms of the status of the forest. Samuel Nketiah, Tropenbos There was a thriving civil society and a government willing to engage with different stakeholders; political interest; and the forest authority was looking for solutions that held promise in the VPA process. Chris Beeko, Ghana Forestry Commission At that time, the UK was importing products with very few questions asked, the only criteria were price and quality. The emerging forest certification process was very useful but it wasn’t able to tackle some of the underlying governance and market failure problems. So we thought about ways to become part of the solution. John Hudson, former DFID forestry staff

1998 onwards 2003

Ghana VPA negotiation

Ghana VPA implementation The system that you have to engage stakeholders before you can settle on a change really slows the process. It is implementation of a process that has a strong multi-stakeholder component. At the end of the day it’s easier to implement it than if you rush through excluding stakeholders. You have to go through the pain so you can get the buy-in at the same time. Chris Beeko, Ghana Forestry Commission

There was this move away from projects into sector budget support, which was supposed to give countries greater control over their development. However, as these funds were to be disbursed to the Ministry of Finance, there was concern within the Forestry Commission about how sector reform would be funded in the absence of projects. Clare Brogan, FLEGT faciltator

2004

By late May, early June 2005, we had a national workshop identifying the different perspectives and commonalities of the stakeholder groups. All wanted to see that the timber industry continued in Ghana in a sustainable manner. Clare Brogan, FLEGT faciltator

2005

2006/7

Ghana requested a study to look at the potential impacts of the VPA, led by IIED, with funding from DFID. To succeed, we needed to have a holistic over haul of the legislative framework in the long term. Samuel Nketiah, Tropenbos

2008

2009

We agreed we’d do a Timber Legality Assurance System pilot before we went into implementation or roll outs. There were issues with the choice of the service provider for the pilot and therefore we did not get the best out of it. Alhassan Attah, former Ghana Forestry Commission

2010

2011

We’ve had the first joint assessments. It brought out corrective action requests and a timeline was developed. This helps us to communicate to the international public on when we will be actually coming to the market with the FLEGT licenses. Chris Beeko, Ghana Forestry Commission

2012

2013

2014

National Process, the case of Ghana

First log tracking programme bans illegal chainsaw use in Ghana.

Ghana becomes one of the first countries to commit to developing a voluntary partnership agreement.

The VPA negotiations start.

The VPA is agreed.

VPA comes into force.

Ghana’s implementation committee works through necessary national changes, e.g. in procurement processes.

International Policy Process

G8 Action Programme on Forests launches international deliberations.

EU adopts FLEGT Action Plan.

International commitment 55 Learning about implementing sustainable development in practice

EU Timber Regulation (EUTR) comes into force.

Ghana VPA negotiation Preparation

Ghana VPA implementation

First assessment of Ghana’s implementation is conducted.

Emerging insights Trade agreements leveraging development outcomes The EU FLEGT Action Plan addresses forest governance issues and tackles illegal logging through the framework of a trade agreement, an option not available to individual EU Member States. Leveraging and shaping the EU agenda on forest governance has been an important aspect of the FGMC programme. Particularly in the beginning, strong ministerial support, increased inter-governmental collaboration, partnerships with the UK timber trade federation and secondments to EU institutions provided a solid foundation to raise UK interests at EU level.

In 2002, the UK signed a bilateral memorandum of understanding with Indonesia to work on legality of timber. Some people in the European Commission thought the UK was going beyond its reach because of the trade implications. The minister deliberately used this to stimulate discussion. The Commission then took it up and developed an action plan of its own. John Hudson, former DFID staff. [In the FLEGT process] we had to make immediate allies, to help influence and spread the message to other member states. You have to identify common interests early on. We had very clear influencing strategies and considered what we had to do to make our case. John Hudson, former DFID staff. Countries exporting timber to the EU - such as Ghana - quickly recognised the VPA as an impetus to change forest governance and management arrangements. In 2005, the Manager of the London office of the Ghana Forestry Commission reported that he had been invited to make a presentation to contractors who were constructing a hospital in the north of England with Government funding. He had attended that meeting to try to secure contracts for Ghanaian timber exporters but was told quite clearly that without the ability to offer independently verified proof of legality/sustainability, there was simply no possibility to secure a contract. The enforcement of the UK’s public procurement policy on timber meant that contractors caught using timber from unverified sources were obliged to remove and replace this material at their own cost. At that time, UK Government contracts accounted for between 12 and 15% of the UK market. The loss of this market and the recognition that other EU member states were moving in the same direction, was a key consideration for Ghana in entering into a VPA. Clare Brogan, FLEGT facilitator. If the EU is coming up with an action plan, that will affect our trade relationship. We quickly will have to realign our own objectives. We also clearly saw that the VPA arrangement is a trading tool that will help us to comply with legalities. We knew we needed some leverage to be able to enforce all the good laws that we have in forest management. Being able to tame the EU market and using that as a leverage to take care of our forests was a good match. Kofi Boakye, Domestic Lumber Trade Association.


Domestic and international concerns mutually supporting one another An important condition for Ghana, to entering the VPA with the EU, was to bring the domestic market into the agreement to ensure the sustainability of their forests and the robustness of the trade agreement. Initially, this was not a requirement of the FLEGT Action Plan. The VPA process provided flexibility to remain adaptable to national contexts and needs.

Ghana realised that unless the domestic market was fully addressed, there would be no point in addressing illegalities associated with the export trade for two reasons. First, addressing only the export trade would not necessarily tackle the issue of sustainable or unsustainable forest management. Secondly, some material from the domestic market invariably trickles into the export trade, so even if you succeed in controlling the export trade you would eventually come across illegalities emanating from the domestic market. For these two reasons, we not just say the domestic and export to the EU, we also included all timber trade, so it covers even exports to non-EU countries. Samuel Nketiah, Tropenbos. For Ghana the EU market was less valuable than it once was. In 2008 the demand for tropical hardwoods significantly dropped. At the time, Ghana looked for markets in other places like the Middle East and elsewhere. Large companies in Ghana remain extremely interested in regaining the market share in Europe. There’s also the 2008 amendment to the Lacey Act in the US. Now companies importing illegal timber to the US could be prosecuted. These were clear incentives for Ghana to support the FLEGT process. Clare Brogan, FLEGT facilitator. Ghana played a key role in bringing about the domestic market dimension. We had been looking for solutions on how to create a legal regime for domestic markets. This was an opportunity to get both technical as well as financial resources to move that agenda forward. Chris Beeko, Ghana Forestry Commission. Throughout the VPA negotiations and implementation, local stakeholders in Ghana skillfully used connections to European NGOs and actors like Forest Watch to advocate for civil society interests and concerns in Europe. European NGOs have been very supportive of the process, and that has been very helpful in amplifying concerns from civil society in Ghana. If we raise an objection to an issue, they will insist that the EU pays attention to that, and then the EU in turn will request Ghanaian authorities to listen to us and sit with us and reach consensus on those issues. Samuel Nketiah, Tropenbos.

Emerging insights Investing in a negotiation process to deliver inclusive and deep change The VPA is constructed initially around the process of defining legality through an inclusive political process that brings stakeholders from government, private sector and civil society together to deliberate and negotiate together to reach a collective agreement as to what constitutes legal timber. Similarly, the implementation phase is overseen by a multi-stakeholder group. FGMC has supported this process through facilitation services, independent studies to inform deliberation, capacity building for stakeholders. Deliberation is a structured process, a transformational exercise. It’s got an agenda, so it’s not just having a chat. It has intention, a product at the end. The more important it is, obviously the more involved people are going to be. It needs to be inclusive. If you leave out key stakeholders, you’re going to get a weaker deliberative process. Finally, what makes it transformative is that it’s informed. It requires stakeholders to reason together. If you can bring in evidence, in the form of monitoring, of studies, of ideology and frameworks or whatever, then you raise the debate. The interest groups have to face something that is greater than and different to the baggage they brought into the room. Dermot Shields, PMST Team Leader. For many VPA countries, including Ghana, it’s the first time these stakeholders come together in such a deliberative way to discuss timber trade and forest governance and present a position as a country. With such a contested topic this requires stakeholders to listen to each other and engage in argument as well as the willingness to compromise. We asked local partners: “If you were to improve forest law enforcement and governance, you have got to define yourself what your problems are. There are a lot of different views and fundamental issues, but what, collectively, as a society, do you want to do?” We then helped to bring the parties together. We had our views, but what needs to be done had to come through them. There was a view that governments make laws, but this was for the people to decide. Giving society an involvement greatly increases the likelihood that laws will actually be implemented. That was a deliberative, iterative process where stakeholders worked through what they were going to do. John Hudson, former DFID staff. There was little awareness in Ghana about what that consultation was going to mean for society. Civil society really wanted to influence and shape the outcome of the discussion. By the time the VPA in Ghana concluded, civil society and the private sector would say unprompted that this is something that everybody is behind. We’ve all shaped it. It’s not something that was drafted by consultants. Clare Brogan, FLEGT facilitator. For a very long time in Ghana, the industry had a very strong lobby with the government. When civil society came in, there was a lot of mistrust and suspicion. We tried to build alliances. Sometimes we have tried to align with industry to fight government, but sometimes we start protesting to the government about unfair deals from industry. We assess where to build alliances, and that has helped. Samuel Nketiah, Tropenbos.


Industry came on board slowly and with caution because from the very start of the VPA it was clear that a system was going to be put in place which would detect illegal activities. They became more enthusiastic when we repackaged the process to show industry that it could make the process simpler, easier and less expensive for them. It would improve their business process. Alhassan Attah, former Executive Director, Timber Industry Development Division, Ghana Forestry Commission It requires a lot of patience to understand the different angles stakeholders bring into the process. One must be prepared to understand that what industry wants would be very different from what the civil society is looking for. One must have some patience to move the process forward. Otherwise, you can have a tough time with yourself in managing the process. Chris Beeko, Ghana Forestry Commission. Negotiations at the national level focused on manageable first steps, in the hope of achieving more ambitious change in the medium and long term. How well these trade-offs work in practice only became evident in the implementation phase of the VPA. Certain things were swept under the carpet at the time to be resolved during the implementation phase. We thought we had reached a compromise – only to reopen discussions in the implementation. That’s the challenge which is throwing Ghana back in this process. What I advise for other countries is to try very hard to reach agreement during the negotiation phase where there are difficulties or agree on next steps. Alhassan Attah, former Executive Director, Timber Industry Development Division, Ghana Forestry Commission One trade-off that didn’t really work has been to exclude certain timber rights from the definition of legal timber. In the implementation phase we saw that it is very problematic to have an access right that is acceptable on the statute books of Ghana but not acceptable in the definition of legality in an agreement. We’ve been fighting over that over the last few years. Chris Beeko, Ghana Forestry Commission.

Emerging insights Legal frameworks as a catalyst for sustainable development action Focusing on legality of timber at a global level was seen as a first step towards sustainable forestry. At a national level the task seemed simple and politically straightforward enough to start. Legality stood out as the most common denominator for all stakeholders to bring their own interests and concerns to the table. In the context of the trade agreement sustainable development or poverty alleviation are not explicit goals of the VPA. It is through the legitimacy of the deliberative process that allows industry to trade and communities to benefit from land use rights and access, and forest to be managed sustainabily. We are now in a situation where if nothing is done, we risk losing our forest completely. So the VPA has come handy to help us restore what we have. When the education of the VPA came up, we realised that we have the same common interest. Because if the forest is not sustained we cannot continue with our job because our livelihood depends on the forest. The same with the forestry commission. If the forest is not there there’s no point in having the forest commission. So we have to work hand in hand. Kofi Boakye, Domestic Lumber Trade Association. If we fully implement what we are doing, the VPA is going to help us to improve on our sustainable forest management practices. We are already improved on law enforcement. We are improving on data collection for better forest management. Even without exporting anything, if we are implementing the technical assistance, that’s promising for us for the sustainable management of our forests which translates also to development. Chris Beeko, Ghana Forestry Commission.

We’ve come to the party with a poverty agenda. The timber trader doesn’t have that agenda, and he needs to be engaged. I need to be convinced that this process is going to have sustainable development results. This is embedded in the actions that the VPA supports, there is no explicit link in the VPA agreement itself. Julia Falconer, DFID. A discussion of sustainable development was championed by the Ministry of Environment. Several committees were set up to look at sustainable development from different angles from structure development, from natural resources, and other perspectives. Obviously, the VPA did make a contribution in terms of natural resources management. Samuel Nketiah, Tropenbos.


Demonstrating the impact of investments in open-ended political processes As a programme focused on forest governance and market mechanisms and set up to deliver legal and policy change, one challenge for FGMC is to quantify its outcomes and make the case for its impact. At the same time, it needs to allow for the political stakeholder process to take its own time, adapt to an emerging political agenda and define its own results – as only that will ensure ownership and effective implementation in the long run.

This process is not just focused on governance issues, it’s got a political approach of getting there. The issues on the table regarding legality in Ghana are decided through a political process. The European Action Plan was decided through a political process. The specification of what’s going on is emerging as it proceeds. It’s going at its own pace. Dermot Shields, PMST Team Leader.

Although big changes take a long time to deliver, there are milestones that you can demonstrate. You must give confidence at the political and the managerial level that the money is being used wisely and is producing results. You can’t just say, this is really important but it takes a long time so come back to me in ten years time and I’ll show you what we’ve done. John Hudson, former DFID staff.

All the big problems in development take time. We’re not going to solve them quickly, we have to stick in there. It’s extremely hard to retain the interest of politicians and of managers in development organizations who are being pressed to demonstrate the return on their budgets quickly. That’s an inherent contradiction. John Hudson, former DFID staff.

Whenever we change one thing, other things also change at the same time and we don’t always know how they’re going to change. It isn’t appropriate to develop a rigid strategy from the outset and say, “This is what we are going to do.” There are a whole range of appropriate strategies, which are adapted to local context and can be innovative. John Hudson, former DFID staff.

Perceived outcomes The general empowerment of the stakeholders has spread in some communities: community members have had the audacity to block roads for timber companies who they suspected to be operating illegally. Yes, there have been some improvements.Samuel Nketiah, Tropenbos. There was genuine ownership. In a recent evaluation, many people interviewed felt there was a change in practice in the forestry commission as a result of the process. Not just that the rules of the game were different but that the way that people were behaving was different. Clare Brogan, FLEGT facilitator. The VPA has given us space to participate in policy formulation. The Deputy Minister for Lands and Natural Resources and representatives from the Ministry of Trade and Industry and Finance were at one of our recent meetings looking for a sustainable way of getting legal timber within the VPA arrangement. It was fantastic, where previously we didn’t have it like that. Kofi Boakye, Domestic Lumber Trade Association.


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Are there opportunities to promote national political processes as a means of achieving developmental goals?

Does promoting deliberation amongst national stakeholders allow for more legitimate outcomes?

Could more systemic results be achieved by working with and learning lessons from other sectors?

Under what circumstances can trade agreements be used as an alternative to investment programmes?

Closing thoughts

We realized that some officers were not applying the requirements of the operating manuals. The audits bring all this out. Transparency has led to questions being asked that has led to people paying closer attention to what is required of them and doing it better. Chris Beeko, Ghana Forestry Commission.

One advice I’d give is: be a good listener. Don’t judge people early because they have different opinions from you. Share information. That’s one of the things most countries don’t do. They tend to keep civil society out of the process. Alhassan Attah, former Executive Director, Timber Industry Development Division, Ghana Forestry Commission.

When different ‘contested’ interests come together and reason out a collective result, it creates a new reality - something transformative. We now see different interests come together in conflict and contestation and come to a result, it’s creating a new reality: businesses are paying their taxes, there are social responsibility agreements in place, the forest management plans are being paid in full and the domestic market is addressed as part of the VPA. Dermot Shields, PMST Team Leader. There is more tolerance now than in the past, particularly from the regulators. Originally, the regulators insisted on compliance with the law rather than discussing issues and then agreeing with interested parties how to move forward. That is happening now in this process. It’s taking a longer time for Ghana to issue the FLEGT licenses because we are going through a lot of consultation in working to bring all stakeholders on board the process. Alhassan Attah, former Executive Director, Timber Industry Development Division, Ghana Forestry Commission

About

This story is part of the DFID’s sustainable development learning dialogue. As part of the dialogue we spoke to eight stakeholders about their experiences and perceptions of shifting forest governance as part of this process. This is the story we heard. All stakeholders helped us review the story and quotes before publishing it. For more information and to participate, go to www.sddialogue.net. 59 Learning about implementing sustainable development in practice

Story contacts DFID Senior Responsible Officer: Julia Falconer [email protected] Website: www.fcghana.org/vpa and www.euflegt.efi.int

Building climate resilience through community-based adaptation

Building climate resilience through community-based adaptation The story of Nepal’s Climate Change Support Programme (2007-2015) The Nepal Climate Change Support Programme (NCCSP) helps the poorest and most vulnerable communities in Nepal cope with the impacts of climate change. The programme has worked with over 100 communities to develop “Local Adaptation Plans Of Action” (LAPAS) - to respond to floods, landslides and droughts. Nepal pioneered a local-community based approach after developing its National Adaptation Plan of Action in 2010. The programme is managed and

delivered by the Government of Nepal, using Government financial management and delivery systems. Nepal’s local approach to climate resilience is now being used to help inform the country’s longer term National Adaptation Plan. It has also been recognised internationally as an example of good practice and a number of other developing countries are now starting to work with LAPAs.

The role of the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) When the Government of Nepal decided to take up the UNFCCC funding to develop a NAPA, DFID saw this as an opportunity. The office in Nepal was already working on a number of different programmes with the government. “The Climate Investment Funds have 3 investments in Nepal. The first investment programmes were scaling up the Renewable Energy Programme, Forestry Investment Programme, and Pilot Programme for Climate Resilience. We worked with the government on making a case for being part of each and looking at how these 3 programmes could work together.” Clare Shakya, DFID To help the Government of Nepal develop a cutting-edge approach to climate change, DFID added $850,000 to complement the initial $200,000 funding provided by the UNFCCC. DFID played a brokering role between the other donors and made a concerted effort to coordinate and align multiple stakeholders. They were heavily involved in the piloting and design phase, taking responsibility for the local development work, and spearheading a much more collaborative way of working at the village level. DFID’s support was important in enabling the Nepali Goverment to develop the LAPA Framework and Manual and helped secure the business case for the LAPA framework at a national level. The following stakeholders were interviewed and took part in a workshop, for this story: United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) – The UNDP helped initiate the NAPA Plus Programme with DFID and were later appointed as the implementing partner to deliver and implement LAPAs on the ground. Anil KC, Durga Uprety, Sita Shahi, Pragati Sharma represented UNDP at our workshop. Central Government of Nepal – Batu Uprety was the former Joint Secretary and Head of the Climate Change Management Division, at the Ministry of Environment (now Ministry of Population and Environment (MoEP)) and is now Chair of the UNFCCC Least Developed Countries Expert Group (LEG). As the expert member on Nepal’s Climate Change Council, he led and coordinated the government’s efforts to identify climate change priorities and build capacity at the local and municipal level. Naresh Sharma, the current undersecretary, at the MoEP, also took part in our workshop.

The insights emerging from this story are: Starting with local climate vulnerabilities as the route to improved livelihoods

4

Building ownership, capacity and leadership within the existing government systems

7

Using local, community-based knowledge to deliver more effective climate adaptation measures

5

Working within existing government structures to allocate and distribute funding at a local level

7

Using relevant language to translate technical expertise into practical action on the ground

6

Investing time in understanding the local context to inform effective programming

8

Coordinating a diverse multistakeholder partnership to deliver effective action across many levels

6


Key stakeholders and their roles

International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) – Simon Anderson was part of the government’s NAPA team, IIED were appointed alongside other consultancies (such as HSTPE) in a consortium, to provide technical assistance on the design and piloting of the programme, through action research. Deepak Rijal – Deepak is an independent climate change specialist from Nepal, who was closely involved with the development of the programme. The European Union – the EU is another donor, who took part in our workshop.

Context In the run up to Copenhagen COP15 climate talks in 2009, many vulnerable countries had developed their NAPAs. Nepal was behind. The country’s constitution has been unstable for many years. We all hope that the constitutional crisis is almost over but it will no doubt carry on for at least another full government. Against that context of fragility, climate change was an area where there was cross-party agreement that Nepal should be doing something. Simon Lucas, DFID. Nepal is a uniquely varied and culturally diverse country. There is a very strong affinity for what’s called the village. People born and bred in Kathmandu still refer to the place where their parents came from as their village. There is this strong realisation that Nepal is very diverse, both geographically, culturally and socio-economically. To do things well, there has to be a very strong appreciation of the full diversity at the local level. Simon Anderson, IIED. Development initiatives have tended to be community-based with knowledge and funding concentrated at the village level. At times, however, this has stretched local and national resources. A wide-range of donor and NGO-led activities have led to a number of different mechanisms competing on the ground. As a result, the government’s ability to build a sufficient response to climate change was being eroded. A stronger, more coordinated approach was urgently needed for Nepal’s most vulnerable people.


Nepalese community involved in the development of their village LAPA.

Timeline Inception

Design & Planning

Clare Shakya was instrumental in bringing this climate change issue forward, she proposed to provide additional funding for NAPA preparation. Our NAPA is different. We get $200,000 from the LDC fund, $200,000 from the Danish Embassy and $875,000 from DFID. It gave us a lot of opportunity to not only to prepare the NAPA, but to create awareness at different levels. Batu Uprety, Government. It was such a critical juncture on the global stage, the timing was such that the Government of Nepal could see if it was ambitious and showed real leadership–they could learn from what others have done. They felt that they were years behind everyone else but that was a huge opportunity for them to leap frog beyond the mistakes that many countries have made. Clare Shakya, DFID.

I went out and was talking to a lot of donors and lots of NGOs about the regional work. At the same time people were asking “So what are you doing in Nepal and what’s going on up there?” So that was the very early start. Clare Shakya, DFID.

2004

2005

NAPAs are established to help developing countries respond to severe climate change impacts.

We actually led all the donor partners together and signed up a Donor Compact on Climate Change in 2009 with the Government of Nepal for mutual cooperation.There were about 9 donor partners and the government signing this compact. That was also the basis for the design of NCCSP and the funding commitment by us, including co-donor the EU. Sabita Thapa, DFID.

2008

The UNFCCC provide US$200,000 to help Nepal initiate their NAPA.

2009

After DFID was the first donor who wanted to support the implementation of the NAPA documents, then we started on how we are going to implement that. The basic idea was to develop the modalities and the framework through which we can implement the LAPA. Deepak Rijal, Independent Consultant. The beauty of the Climate Change Policy is what the Prime Minister told us at the time: ‘you have to ensure that the funding for climate change reaches the ground’. That political message was translated into action through the Climate Change Policy that states more than 80% of the climate change funding must reach the village. The politicians were able to instruct us to develop a mechanism that ensures that more funding is channeled to the field level activities. It’s on that basis the NCCSP was developed. Batu Uprety, Government.

Although we started Climate Change Policy formulation in 2007, it only went for approval by the cabinet in January 2011. At the beginning, we didn’t know what to include in the climate change policy. It’s a learning by doing process. It took 4 years, but it also created awareness to build capacity and a process to launch climate change activities in Nepal. It helped engage several stakeholders in the climate change adaptation process. Batu Uprety, Government.

At the first multi stakeholder event someone, from an NGO, who’d been working in the area for years, stood up and said we shouldn’t have NAPAs we could have LAPAs. Clare Shakya, DFID.

2007

2006

International

Implementation

2010

UNFCCC Secretariat has received NAPAs from 39 LDCs in the run up to the Copenhagen COP.

2011

2012

Nepal is nominated to chair the LDC for the next two years.

Nepal convenes a regional conference on climate adaptation in mountainous areas, involving international experts.

DFID set up an MoU with the Government; the national business case for LAPAs is established.

The UNDP is selected by the government to help with technical assistance on the ground.

2013

National

Nepal is identified as one of the most vulnerable LDCs to climate change.

Local

DFID and other donors see this as an opportunity to build climate resilience and tackle poverty in Nepal.

Impact analysis is carried out by the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank.

The NAPA Inception Workshop takes place involving 150 stakeholders - the LAPA approach is conceived.

DFID run a tender to invite proposals on how to make the LAPAs work. A consortium is set up with the IIED and HTSP.

The IIED identify 10 pilot LAPAs. 3-4 are test run by DFID. Once the LAPA framework is agreed, 69 village LAPAs and one at the municipal level, form the basis of the NCCSP.

Inception 63 Learning about implementing sustainable development in practice

Design & Planning

2014

2015

International workshop on community-based adaptation led by the Nepali Government is held, linked to the Green Climate Fund.

The Nepal delegation are invited to present NCCSP as an example of good practice in community based adaptation at COP21 in Paris. Agreed a National Adaptation Plan (NAP) is required to coordinate all the LAPAs over the mid-to-long term.

A further 31 LAPAs are developed 23 at the village level, 7 at the municipal level.

Implementation

90 village LAPAs and 7 municipal LAPAs have been implemented, providing 4,500 local adaptation measures.

Emerging insights Starting with local climate vulnerabilities as the route to improved livelihoods The international NAPA process brought climate change into focus. The Government of Nepal were keen to make up on lost time by formulating a best practice approach. To do this, the government and DFID knew they needed to integrate climate change into local planning processes in a meaningful way. We spoke with the government about what would be a really cutting edge way of looking at climate change, recognising the uncertainty. There was very poor communication around climate change in Nepal. Some people saying: ‘it’s going to get a lot dryer’; other people saying: ‘no, it’s going to get wetter’. They were looking at different models. Looking at the range and thinking about how to approach the uncertainty we identified significant climate events based on particular dry periods or particular flooding periods and talked about those with communities. We asked them: ‘if you had more of these type of events what would happen’? ‘This event that happened five years ago, if that happens every other year how would you cope? What would your livelihood look like? How would you continue to thrive’? Clare Shakya, DFID. We genuinely had something we thought was relatively new and innovative that made the best of development experience and applied it to climate, as opposed to trying to invent climate as a new sector. Simon Lucas, DFID. Using climate change as a lens to adjust the way they looked at development helped differentiate the programme. Traditional development tends to look at people’s needs first; the Nepal LAPAs looked at climate change vulnerabilities first, and then built in that people’s needs. It aimed to connect the variability and uncertainty associated with natural systems and resources–that the poorest people depend on–with their ability to create livelihoods and thrive in the future. We have big challenges because the climate is so uncertain; it can pose threats anytime of the year. Other than autumn, we have many different hazards: cold waves, heat waves, floods, landslide, and droughts. We have to consider how we can best and quickly respond to these hazards so that we can protect people and people’s livelihoods. Deepak Rijal, Independent Consultant. We look at the whole climate change issue from the angle of impact first. For example, water supply, what supplies the village and how does climate change impact this? Whereas conventional development programming will focus on asking people what they think their development needs are. Sabita Thapa, DFID.


The development needs of one vulnerable community, compared with another, could be very similar. However, the variation in climate activities and shocks, can expose vulnerabilities that affect people’s livelihoods in very different ways. Identifying the most effective unit, such as village or municipality, to organise and structure the NCCSP local development planning and governance activities around was an important consideration to fully integrate climate change. Kathmandu Valley could be a unit from climate perspective. However, if you look at the climatic variability, precipitation and temperature in the place where I live, we get nearly 1500mm of rainfall annually. Go just 8km away from my home, to Godavari, and you get 2100mm annually. 500mm is a huge difference and potentially a resource. Deepak Rijal, Independent Consultant. By doing it this way, climate change impacts could be viewed as an opportunity. The LAPA framework was designed to help vulnerable people turn impacts into resources. We have to look at the environment we are managing and how we can capitalize on resources, for example, precipitation and heavy rainfall is a resource: how can we take that excessive rainfall and capitalise on that for our economic purposes? We did this in the LAPA framework by testing the upstream and downstream linkages. In practice, we looked at how people upstream should conserve natural resources and stabilise slopes, so that people downstream in the lake, who are fishing or fish farming, will benefit. There are clearly some benefit sharing mechanisms. People who benefit downstream from fishing or selling fish, contribute upstream to develop education or afforestation or organic conversation farming. Those activities are supported through the income that’s generated. Deepak Rijal, Independent Consultant.

Emerging insights Using local, community-based knowledge to deliver more effective climate adaptation measures Nepal is a very diverse country not only geographically but culturally, socially and economically. The village is part of the Nepali culture. There was a strong local foundation for the programme to capitalise on. There was also a huge amount of existing development knowledge amassed at the local level and a genuine interest to translate this into a series of more inclusive, and communitybased programmes of action. We needed something that built on the enormous amount of community-based development knowledge in Nepal, but is equally, linked to the government processes. That’s why this LAPA idea came up, building on all that ability of community forestry and local development programmes. Simon Lucas, DFID. A key enabling factor was the genuine interest across most stakeholders in Nepal for the recognition of the socio-economic, socio-cultural, socio-ecological diversity in the country. There was an appreciation that vulnerability–to a large extent–had been an outcome of the development deficit, and there was a need to invert what is actually a top-down process set up by the NAPAs into a bottomup process. So you have the two things going in parallel, bottom-up and top-down. Simon Anderson, IIED. It was a really exciting moment, we brought a lot of stakeholders together and they all said we really believe in bottom-up development. We shouldn’t have NAPAs we should have LAPAs. That led to perhaps one of the greatest innovations. Clare Shakya, DFID.

Through consultation, it became clear that everything hinged on the local level. Diversity in culture and climate could be accounted for from the village perspective. There was a willingness of people to be inclusive, that’s why LAPA came about. It was about including people from the margins in what was essentially a centrally coordinated process. The principle of taking onboard the full diversity across all of the different regions of Nepal– East, West, North, South, from the lowlands to high mountains. All of that was there before we started to talk about NAPA, but the way that was translated into the NAPA process was recognition of LAPA being important. Simon Anderson, IIED. There were several meetings because it was a new idea. None of the other LDCs were thinking to localise adaptation. We did it through a consultative process. Batu Uprety, Government. There was a consensus in Nepal that the only way to build truly responsive climate adaptation plans for vulnerable people was to work with them from the bottom-up. The next step involved putting this into practice. The development of bespoke community-based plans was piloted. DFID invested $1million into the IIED for the pilot phase, which allowed us to test a sort of community-driven development model of local adaptation planning in 10 pilot places. That gave the ministry the confidence to say: ‘yes, this is the approach’. Simon Lucas, DFID. We tested that hypothesis in 10 districts, and based on that learning, we designed a framework for implementing adaptation programmes at a grassroots level. From a conceptual framework, we developed modalities on how to get there at the community level like: vulnerability assessments and planning processes; steps on how to go about that; how we target people; and, targeting the most vulnerable areas. A step-by-step process was designed into the LAPA framework. Deepak Rijal, Independent Consultant.


The government’s Climate Change Policy, agreed by the cabinet in January 2011, paved the way for the agreement of the LAPA framework in November 2011. The Climate Change Policy mandated that the majority of climate funding must reach the local level. The beauty of the Climate Change Policy is what the Prime Minister told us at the time: ‘you have to ensure that the funding for climate change reachs the ground’. That political message was translated into action through the Climate Change Policy that states more than 80% of the climate change funding must reach the village. The politicians were able to instruct us to develop a mechanism that ensures that more funding is channeled to the field level activities. It’s on that basis the NCCSP was developed. Batu Uprety, Government. The government itself was saying: ‘yes, we want to engage local NGOs who deliver these things and we want to participate to local planning process.’ Only in Nepal would all those things be naturally accepted just because of the long history of local to rural development. Nepal’s LAPA approach has a lot of credibility, because it’s very much about getting the money down to the local level. That’s where the 80% to the local level figure came from. It was a very clear presumption that climate money should reach the poorest in Nepal, which is a very clear message that’s been quite useful in protecting the money. Simon Lucas, DFID. The community focus has allowed the programme to work more quickly, using existing local and government implementers, to ensure resources get directly to the communities on the ground.

Emerging insights Using relevant language to translate technical expertise into practical action on the ground

Coordinating a diverse multi-stakeholder partnership to deliver effective action across many levels

The complex, multifaceted nature of climate change can make the issue overwhelming. The NCCSP programme coordinators had a strong desire to communicate the LAPA process in a way that everyone, from the village heads to leading thinkers, could understand. It was a learning process, particularly for the technical experts part of the consortium, who were tasked with prototyping and drafting the initial LAPA guidance. The LAPA documentation they produced had to be re-written to avoid the use of technical language and make it practical at the community level. It was translated into Nepalese and the term ‘climate change’ was often purposefully avoided.

For the programme to work, DFID and the government agreed the process would need to be run and coordinated differently. It had to address the problems faced by the existing local development work, where key players operated independently, often duplicating efforts. Instead, the aim was to create a coordination space where multiple stakeholders were more closely aligned and their resources could be better used for cumulative effect. DFID led the process that managed how the donors should work together, resulting in a Donor Compact on Climate Change between 9 donors, who agreed to coordinate their funding more strategically.

The government said: ‘we are designing adaptation policy framework for application at the local level by district officers who have to implement it. If officials at the local level do not understand this, it’s not going to be practical’. The second thing is about not being very technical or jargonistic on climate change. Don’t explain climate change actions at the local level in terms of global warming or a 2-5 degree rise in temperature. Given the challenges in climate change awareness, we avoided calling any of these actions climate change actions. In many places, we didn’t actually use the word climate change at all. Instead, we spoke about making development actions more sustainable in the long run. Sabita Thapa, DFID.

The head at DFID at the time was up for engaging in this space as long as it was something that demonstrated a better way of doing things–where we could bring a lot of donors together and improve the donor coordination space. Clare Shakya, DFID.

There was a lot of discussion around how to simplify adaptation at the local level. My first job was to produce a very, very simple document, something that could be understood by the community, who are the owners of that policy. We also had a lot of discussions with the non-technical the local development officers. Sabita Thapa, DFID.

We are transferring our global knowledge to the government system, so they can articulate and implement it in the national planning systems. The body of knowledge generated through the development of the program, sits not only within the 100 LAPAs but they can articulate this for the whole country. Deepak Rijal, Independent Consultant. There have been intensive training requirements across multiple levels of the programme to build knowledge. There are ongoing challenges facing the implementation of technical assistance on the ground due to how remote some of the LAPA locations are. We were working in very remote areas and many of the local development offices in charge of NCCSP, were transferred from there very quickly. Nobody wanted to be in the remote areas. They can be transferred after 6 months or 1 year. For some areas, you need to trek for 7 days to get there. Sabita Thapa, DFID.


There was a remarkably collegiate feeling. Working with people, who: A, had the ability to define things, because it was all new; and B, shared a common vision of what we were trying to deliver. Simon Lucas, DFID. Stakeholders were organised in a single, multilayered process that channeled the flow of communication from the village to the district level, to the national level. Different partners were responsible for different aspects of the process and a strong emphasis was placed on relationship building throughout. This helped steer the process and facilitate effective communication between a very diverse set of stakeholders, who were able to determine how they engage at any level. The process gathered momentum through a series of multistakeholder events.

The management arrangement has to be very, very simple. By simplifying, it doesn’t mean that you cut off the other important relevant stakeholders. You work with all of them in a more coordinated fashion, trying to work on the relational, while also working on the procedural details. Eventually they started talking to each other through one forum that was inclusive and participatory. Sabita Thapa, DFID. We agreed tentatively with the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, that they would look after the biggest sector of investment, and we’d look after the local development work. We were a very handson development partner in this process. We had a very good relationship with the Ministry of Environment and Science and Technology. Simon Lucas, DFID. NAPA provided a basis to establish coordination committees at the village level, municipality level and district level. Our intention, at that time, was to collect the village level issues, and if they are very important for policy intervention, bring them to the Climate Change Council at the national level. Batu Uprety, Government.

Emerging insights Building ownership, capacity and leadership within the existing government systems

Working within existing government structures to allocate and distribute funding at a local level

Finding and agreeing the right government structures that strengthened the process at every level, and ultimately, inspired local ownership was not easy. It took time, energy and commitment. Everyone involved needed to buy-in to the process and be prepared to learn by doing, before the ownership of different parts of the process could be handed over to the government. There was a very involved engagement process: firstly, to decide where ownership should sit and who should be responsible; and secondly, to identify whether the people there had the capacity and expertise they needed.

NCCSP took a deliberate decision to work within existing local and government structures to build capacity at all levels. The government wanted to avoid taking an overly cumbersome and bureaucratic approach; they could see the advantages of dispersing money directly at the local level. The Ministry of the Environment drove the process, focusing heavily on getting the money to the right places. The programme took an integrated approach, allowing the interconnections between climate change and certain government systems to identify the units and levels the programme should work into–weaving adaptations into existing structures, rather than creating new ones.

It was probably 2008 when the government took leadership of the steering process. I started asking donors to come together and have discussions. One way of getting DFID Nepal support for a programme in this space, was if we could demonstrate that we were going to come together on the climate– especially for the sectors we were struggling with so many different initiatives running in parallel. We would actually start from the beginning, with a much more deftly managed approach, thinking through the sequencing and the division of labour between the donors and the government. Clare Shakya, DFID.

We were looking for something that was investable. At the same time, our government advisors were saying: ‘don’t make it complicated, build on what’s already there.’ There was a lot of debate about the use or non-use of government systems. Simon Lucas, DFID.

We had plenty of discussion and consent from different stakeholders involved, for the government to recently realise themselves that it is the government unit –the lowest unit like Village District Council or municipality–that should be the unit for planning and delivery. Deepak Rijal, Independent Consultant.

The government is allocating 8-9% of the total budget resources to address climate change programs in climate sensitive sectors. This is how the government has recognised the value of climate and they have also introduced a climate change budget code. They have introduced that climate budget in the whole national planning process across all sectors. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to say what percentage of budget is allocated for climate sensitive sectors. Deepak Rijal, Independent Consultant.

Making the local government talk to the Ministry of Environment was a major challenge. But the implementation and process has has to be owned by the local government and it has to be understood by them, no matter how slow the design process is. I would actually not create any additional institutional structures at the local or national level–use whatever’s there. We try to use existing forums for coordination: climate change requires a lot of coordination. Sabita Thapa, DFID.

Previously, in NAPA projects, DFID supported the government by channeling all its funding through UNDP. In this NCCSP project, based on the experience at the time, DFID and the EU supported the government, and the government will channel agreed funding to the UNDP as the service provider (to implement the programme). That is a clear difference and it is not easy to work on this model. The intention is to support the government and put the government in the ‘driving seat’, rather than to get information from the government. Batu Uprety, Government.

There wasn’t enough capacity at the local level, it needed awareness and capacity building effort for the first 2 years. Simon Lucas, DFID. We agreed with the government that we will revise the LAPA framework for more clarity and simplicity. Actually, the whole process was handed over to the government–a joint secretary, who was the head of the Climate Change Management Division, led it [Batu Uprety]. Sabita Thapa, DFID. Although we started Climate Change Policy formulation in 2007, it only went for approval by the cabinet in January 2011. At the beginning, we didn’t know what to include in the Climate Change Policy. It’s a learning by doing process. It took 4 years, but it also created awareness to build capacity and a process to launch climate change activities in Nepal. It helped engage several stakeholders in the climate change adaptation process. Batu Uprety, Government.


Emerging insights Investing time in understanding the local context to inform effective programming For the villages to be empowered to make decisions that build their climate resilience in a rapid, responsive and adaptive way, there must be a good level of understanding on the ground. This takes time. Building a deep understanding of communities needs at the village level has driven greater uptake of local funding made available, thereby improving the ability of the programme to deliver what’s needed for Nepal’s most vulnerable people. Taking the time that’s needed to build capacity at a local level has been critical in developing a programme that hopes to deliver longer lasting impacts. We looked at the evaluation and ran through the areas where they identified a good practice or areas that hadn’t done so well. We talked this through with the government and established those as our acceptable criteria. They basically said: ‘we may have been slow but we want to be absolutely cutting edge in what we do’. They set out to do something that was really multi-stakeholder and that really involved engagement across the country. Clare Shakya, DFID.

Even though the programme was very slow at the start, the communities have a lot of ownership. It has to be owned by the communities, and at the national level, it really has to be owned and understood by the government. That’s a big factor. The flip side of it is the whole slower pace of the programme. Sabita Thapa, DFID.


Resource budgeting, results-based management, and those things, tend to force us to work at a pace which is an artificial one when compared to the genuine pace of what is happening in a development process in a development-deficit country. That doesn’t mean that things go slow. Things go slow, slow, quick, quick, slow, but you’ve got to be there and be ready to respond. At times, you have to respond immediately, but also, during the slow period, you have to be investing hugely in what’s going to come up. Simon Anderson, IIED.

Directly and indirectly, we are integrating climate dimension in the whole, 14 step, planning process. We can see that in the national programmesthe planning commission has developed-it has given strong attention to climate and environmental management, reflected in the 3 year planning documents. Deepak Rijal, Independent Consultant.

Perceived outcomes Making the multi-stakeholder element central to the process was one of the most important things. This improved the quality of the discussion and the quality of the ideas that came out of a series of events. First the LAPA design coming out of NAPA. Then that process led to the big conference on climate change held alongside the pre-Copenhagen regional conference on climate change which was yet another multi-stakeholder initiative, where the debate was facilitated. Clare Shakya, DFID. The government was really committed to playing a key role in international climate negotiations and wanted to be able to demonstrate that it was responding to adaptation needs in its own country. This has been achieved–in spite of the bureaucratic challenges; frequent staff movements within the ministry; and huge geographical challenges in terms of getting to the areas that are most vulnerable. Mark Smith, DFID. The LAPA policy framework is so well accepted. If you go to the districts today, the local communities understand LAPA. One thing I really like about this programme is that the money has actually reached people. With many of the government programmes I have seen about 60 to 70% of the money remains at the central level but LAPA has ensured funds flow directly to the local level. And, the additionality is that considerable local capacity has been built. Sabita Thapa, DFID.

Questions for reflection The government is allocating resources to address climate change programmes. Nearly 8 to 9% of the total budget is allocated for climate sensitive sectors. NCCSP has implemented and invested nearly 70-75% of the plan. Deepak Rijal, Independent Consultant.

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5

How can we more effectively mainstream climate change?

Is it possible to join up multiple levels of programming?

How can local adaptation measures have an impact on poverty alleviation?

What ownership structures bring local level information to the highest political level?

How can communitybased engagement methods be used in other programmes?

The fact that we have LAPAs bubbling up in Mozambique, and we have country adaptation funds established in Kenya and district adaptation funds starting to be established in Tanzania and in Mali– you can trace the genealogy of those initiatives back to the Nepal LAPA process. Simon Anderson, IIED.

Closing thoughts The way in which donors have been able to work coherently in different areas of support, through to the government at a national and local level is pretty impressive. The government has been able to coordinate to get support into different areas. There is a structure and there are different ways things are fitting in–there is a national approach, international approach and the local approach. It’s certainly something that has enabled things to be achieved and will continue to in the future.

It’s very rare to get it right in terms of funding from the country level, meshing with funding from the regional level and the international level. Here, there is a good story to tell about the way in which that’s been locked into a framework, which DFID helped to create. We continue to work within that framework, and continue to help develop it. Mark Smith, DFID.

About

This story is part of the DFID’s sustainable development learning dialogue. As part of the dialogue we spoke to ten stakeholders about their experiences and perceptions of the NCCSP process. We also ran a workshop. This is the story we heard. All stakeholders helped us review the story and quotes before publishing it. For more information and to participate, go to www.sddialogue.net. 69 Learning about implementing sustainable development in practice

Mark Smith, DFID.

Story contacts

DFID Core Project Team: Pratima Ranjit, [email protected] and Annika Olsson, [email protected] Programme video: https://youtu.be/oU-M5px-e5U

The story of our learning

The story of our learning The story of the Sustainable Development Learning Dialogue (2015-2016) Introduction

Building on previous work around how DFID can learn about and communicate climate change more effectively, the Sustainable Development Learning Dialogue was an experiment in learning within DFID around a relevant question: How can DFID promote and sustain transformational and inclusive growth in developing countries through programming that supports low carbon, resilient development pathways and sustainable natural resource management? When we embarked on our own learning journey we were clear this was about learning for change, not just learning to get clever as individuals. It is clear that the future will be profoundly different from the past and we need to learn in an active way, in the moment, try new things, reflect and pilot. These are the elements we tried to capture in each of these learning stories. How are teams approaching the future needs of partners and stakeholders? How can we create the conditions for people and organisations draw on collective wisdom and move out of traditional ways of doing things? You will see conversations, stories and capturing emerging practice are important elements of the work. Jane Clark, DFID The way I see it is that we are supporting DFID to have a conversation with itself – creating feedback loops from its experience on the ground to other parts of the organisation in the hope that that experience can enrich future decision making about sustainable development programming. Rachel Phillips

The three main objectives for the programme were: 1. Harvesting and sharing stories of emerging practice from the ICF in order to demonstrate how sustainable development can be successfully implemented on the ground, including what works well, and why; 2. Using stories of emerging practice and conversations around them to enrich the DFID ‘narrative on sustainable development’ with real examples from our programmes; 3. Piloting a new participatory approach to learning about implementation of sustainable development to inform the design of future efforts to learn from the ICF portfolio. The design for the Sustainable Development Learning Dialogue was informed by four key approaches. 1. Dialogue is defined as a conversation between two or more people. Many adult learning approaches recognise that dialogue is one of the main ways in which people interact with information, make sense of it, explore potential applications in different contexts and, in the process, create new knowledge and know-how for the organisation. Framing this piece of work as a dialogue process helped enable DFID to learn as an organisation, and keep the multiple audiences at the top of mind during all the stages of the programme. 2. Borrowing from the learning history approach, the team mapped out the timeline of each programme highlighting key milestones along the way, which provided a sense of the journey and evolution of each programme. By engaging with a wide range of stakeholders and telling their stories in their words, the resulting rich narrative held multiple perspectives and went below the surface to what actually happened on the ground. 3. Taking an appreciative inquiry approach enabled the team to engage in conversations


about what worked in practice and how to build on this. Tensions and challenges were reframed from the perspective of having solved them. Using this approach to both the interviews and the narrative form created a safe space and enabled the resulting learning outputs to include some of the challenges which some stakeholders may otherwise have been reticent about sharing publicly. In taking an appreciative approach to our discussions about what is working well in programmes, really helped to unlock people’s experiences and share things they don’t usually have the space to talk about. When we asked people what they were most proud of and what they learnt personally, you could really feel the energy in them shift. I really liked the way we engaged with these programmes, and I think they did too. The question this raises for me is, how does DFID use this approach to create more spaces like this for people to have richer conversations like this, more regularly? Russell Cook 4. The creative principles (see Annex 4) drew on both DFID’s Learning for Change principles and Communicating Climate Change principles. As part of the engagement planning process, the team developed a custom approach based on past experience to capturing and sharing learning in meaningful and accessible ways. We’ve always had in the back of our minds that this work only has value if people interact with it. We sometimes had to give readers information about the project context in one sentence. Of course the world is more complex than that. But the question is can I build a bridge to my complicated part of the development world for someone who isn’t in that particular niche at this moment. Wiebke Herding

Key stakeholders and their roles The Sustainable Development Learning Dialogue was commissioned by DFID’s Climate and Environment Department, this work was lead by Jane Clark (Head of Learning) and Annika Olsson (Economic Adviser). Later on, James Alawi (Policy Adviser). The implementation team included Chloe Dyson (Communication Specialist), John Colvin (Learning Advisor), Juliane Nier (Learning Specialist), Rachel Phillips (Implementation Team Lead), Russell Cook (Learning Specialist) and Wiebke Herding (Communication Specialist).

Timeline Inception

Harvesting

Engagement

Sensemaking

Sensemaking

One of the key lessons I’d take away from this is the need to invest time to do this programme and project. We shoehorned it in to six months, which in hindsight feels farcical, but actually we didn’t know. I think just really thinking through how much time each process & part will take, particularly going out to complex environments, speaking to lots of different stakeholders, having to follow up with different stakeholders. James Alawi If we’d try to get the perfect seven projects, and there was no energy in them, it would have been really hard work. It was hard enough work as it was. In a perfect world, we might have tried to get a different balance of programmes, but actually, we just basically had to put out a call saying, ‘Who wants to come to the party?’ Jane Clark I really admired the DFID teams commitment and vision for organisational learning and really being up for experimenting with new approaches to learning. From the start this gave me confidence and I think this can be seen in the quality of the output Russell Cook

The first thing we delivered was the two page introduction. This was a really useful process. Inspired by the creative look and feel we developed for the project, the DFID team challenged us to avoid the use of long text and work more into the visuals. We ended up with the flow diagram and the quotes. That set the precedent and the tone of where we wanted to go. Chloe Dyson

I definitely think the two-stage process worked. We had ten potential hours of interviews for each story, so we’d do three or four interviews with some of the key people on our list to get the broad story mapped out and get a sense of where certain areas, questions, themes or topics were coming up. Then we’d ask additional questions in the other subsequent interviews to get more depth and bring out the richness of certain aspects. Russell Cook

For me to draft the story it’s really about what is the story I am hearing. And then to write it down whilst knowing that this story can’t possibly be perfect. It’s so much more important to have a story than trying to have a perfect story, which doesn’t exist anyway. Who would decide what’s perfect? Wiebke Herding

2015 MAY Milestones

ToR is released and the team is invited to tender

I found the synthesis phase most challenging, personally, because I hadn’t been in the conversations, so I was trying to synthesise what I could see, where other people had conversations. I really struggled by listening to what the teams had heard, and not trying to superimpose my ideas on top of that. I was quite uncomfortable at that stage, because I felt distinctly incompetent to be true to the stories that you’d heard. Jane Clark

Our own story of learning has been a bit rushed. But actually drawing up our own timeline and reflecting on key decisions, particularly as we have used an adaptive management approach, has been really important and insightful. And I’m already thinking ‘Uh, where can I apply this process next?’ Juliane Nier

There’s a great question that’s come up throughout our sense making and across the two Lunch & Learns: what is it about sustainable development that’s different? Or is this just good development practice? That’s not something we could answer with the data we collected here, but I think it’s a great next learning question to explore - so I hope that gets picked up too. Rachel Phillips

2016 JUNE

JULY

After the proposal is accepted, the kick-off meeting takes place on 18 June.

A second inception meeting takes place on 14 July.

AUGUST Projects are identified, and the harvesting phase starts with the first interviews.

SEPTEMBER OCTOBER

NOVEMBER DECEMBER

The first site visit to the GET FiT programme in Uganda takes place. The implementation team meets for a Rapid Sensemaking Day.

The second site visit to Nepal takes place with the support of Annika Olsson. The first stories are being drafted.

Outputs

The sensemaking framework and engagement plan are developed. The 2-page introduction to the project is published.

More details on harvesting approach and target timeline are available

Initial maps of emerging themes are developed, and prototypes for story format and timelines emerge.

Sensemaking workshop with the DFID team takes place on 2 October. Monitoring and evaluation practitioners get involved, as the second round of interviews progress. The creative principles are available as a formal document.

FEBRUARY

Final interviews take place. Initial feedback on first stories. Second sensemaking workshop takes place on 25 January to develop the synthesis review. Timelines, progress and engagement plan re-evaluated.

Two Lunch & Learns take place: 4 February (Resilience) and 9 February (Energy) Quotes are added to the ‘evidence base’ of the themes. The team adds reflection on the process and content learning questions.

The initial ten themes are identified; and all stories are complete.

Sensemaking Inception

Remote harvesting continues, and the quote validation process starts.

JANUARY

MARCH

All quotes are The final validated, and six workshop takes stories signed off place on 14 April. by all stakeholders The team adds individual reflections about the process to the synthesis review.

Feedback on the ten themes is available on the 10 themes; the narrative is refined.

The learning stories and the synthesis review, including this story of learning, are published. The draft methodology report is available.

Sensemaking Harvesting

APRIL

Engagement

The learning journey Inception: taking time at the beginning to map the space The Sustainable Development Learning Dialogue began with an inception workshop. The core team spent the morning together and invited a number of different stakeholders to join them, in order to gain their input and buy-in to the project. We brought people in right at the start of the discussion, for the engagement, and to help frame the project. James Alawi The kick off meeting was very useful, but on reflection, we did miss the opportunity to check and agree a couple of our assumptions at the beginning which had some implications later on. Rachel Phillips A key initial part of the approach was to develop a sensemaking framework for the Sustainable Development Learning Dialogue. It included the overall learning question and sub-questions around which the team designed interviews, sensemaking and synthesis process. It is so much more powerful to start with questions rather than solutions, it helps you to start with an open mind. Jane Clark The questions were quite hard for us; sustainable development is about the most complex topic, so we had to work quite hard to think about content and process and perceived impact, and try to make sure we covered all of those. John Colvin We probably should have tightened the question. It started out as a green growth dialogue. And then it changed into the sustainable development dialogue, and I thought, ‘Wait a minute, we’re going too wide’. But then I’d missed the moment. On reflection I see you have to have patience to work on the questions, ensuring they are open brings value later on: slow down to speed up Jane Clark


Sustainable development felt like a very broad topic to be exploring – focusing the question around DFID’s experience on the ground was important to put some boundaries on it. Rachel Phillips Another step during the inception stage was identifying and engaging the programmes to work with. After defining an initial set of criteria and aiming for a spread of Low Carbon, Resilience and Natural Resource Management programmes, the final programme selection was driven more by social capital and where the interest and energy lay. In the end, we didn’t have as broad a spread of programmes as we’d initially planned. Is that a problem? We ended up with a range of diverse and interesting stories from DFID’s experience on the ground. We could have made different choices – for example focusing on resilience, where we had five stories – but then we would’ve missed the rich learning from GET FiT and FGMC. In different contexts, the programme selection might be more critical, but in this instance, I think going with the energy worked well for us. Rachel Phillips Finally, building on earlier work on learning for change and communicating climate change, the team invested resources upfront to build the understanding of our target audiences and develop a comprehensive engagement plan, including insights from audience interviews and a survey. At times, to me, this stage felt uncomfortable, slow and clumsy. That is why often people skip through this process, because people feel uncomfortable when it’s not going at pace, they’re not feeling very productive and competent. But actually, the team held us to account to do that, and it’s probably going to be reflected in the quality of the output and impact. Jane Clark

The audience mapping really informed for the engagement plan and how people would interact with the product. People told us they prefer short, snappy documents, rather than long form text. They also wanted answers to some very tricky questions. We planned for a 1-page introduction, 2-page stories and a 4-page report. But there was so much richness in the dialogue that we had to change the outputs to match that. We ended up with a 2-page introduction, 5-8-page stories, a 20-page report and an additional story about learning. That’s an enormous jump in the scope of work. I hope we’ve found a middle ground that still challenges people and adds value. Chloe Dyson The first outputs in line with the engagement plan were a brief introduction to the project and a set of creative principles outlining the look and feel of the learning outputs (see Appendix). These were used to craft short, accessible and interesting stories with a visual implementation that supported the concept of a learning dialogue. I saw the value as soon as we started producing material. So when we got the project introduction, I was saying, ‘Aha, we couldn’t have done that if we hadn’t have had those conversations - now I can see why we invested time in that’. Jane Clark The creative process brought the idea of learning through conversations to life, it shows dialogue and the transfer of knowledge as an ecosystem of dialogues by drawing the Fibonacci sequence into the look and feel. A lot of thought went into that. Once it was accepted by DFID it allowed them to challenge us and take the creative much further. The development of the creative starts with the inception of the project. Chloe Dyson

The learning journey Harvesting stories: listening and learning from practice on the ground Following the programme selection, the team scheduled initial interviews with the main contact to map the stakeholders involved in the programme. A wide set of stakeholders helped to tell the programme story from a range of perspectives, bringing in voices that might normally not appear in this constellation. So the learning history approach is about bringing in the voices of different people, and juxtaposing these, and allowing the story to emerge through these multiple voices. John Colvin We got a really good cross-section of perspectives and you worked really hard to make sure that we got a range of stakeholder voices in each story. Jane Clark Some of our DFID contacts commented that new and different things have come out of seeing the quotes and perspectives from the different stakeholders, even though they speak with each other all the time. Rachel Phillips Two different approaches were used for the story harvesting: remote harvesting and site visits. This was mainly driven by the available budget and seen as an opportunity to test two different approaches. The remote harvest used a two-stage approach. An initial round of interviews (usually with the DFID contact point and one or more implementation partners) helped to map the timeline and storyline of the programme and emerging themes. Reviewing those, the team then developed more indepth questions for the second round of interviews.


I have really discovered the power of story timelines. At the beginning it can be tricky patching content from different interviews together into one timeline. But it really gets people to look back, think about trade offs, decision points, sticky moments, challenges and what was done about it, how decisions played out in the long term. To me timelines highlight how these programmes are really quite carefully constructed and engineered, like in the case of the Urban Climate Change Trust Fund. Juliane Nier During the remote harvest of PSNP I had some fantastic interviews because they were incredibly articulate, and had lots of things to say: about their learnings, around the programme intentions and what they were doing, the experience and how it all worked. There was an immense amount of pride and commitment emerging as they told the stories of their experiences. Russell Cook The best moments were actually asking genuinely simple and authentic questions around ‘What are you most proud of? What did you learn most from the programme? What advice would you give someone who was just starting to design a sustainable development programme?’ Juliane Nier For site visits, some of the team spent up to four days immersed in the country context and environment to harvest stories. Whereas most remote interviews were done on a one-to-one basis, the site visits allowed us to conduct a variety of approaches including one-to-one interviews, small stakeholder group interviews and a larger group workshop. Being on site really helped us very quickly build on each and every conversation or interaction.

Arriving in Uganda, everybody was really keen to share their experiences with the GET FiT programme and were happy to talk about it. It made it really easy to get people to tell the story. By the end of the site visit, there’s a lot of momentum created in a short few days, with a wide range of people. Just by being there: in the culture and in people’s’ offices feels more connected, like you’re with them and experiencing their story. On reflection this massively helped us to rapidly make sense of the multiple perspectives and learn from the ‘whole’ programme and create more meaningful narratives and insights. Russell Cook In Nepal we ran a multi-stakeholder workshop with a mix of people: we had the Nepali government, UNDP, the EU and DFID in the room reflecting on the NCCSP story together. A couple of people mentioned how useful it was to be in the room doing this together because that didn’t happen very often. And during the breaks there were lots of lively conversations as people were grabbing the opportunity to catch up. Rachel Phillips

The learning journey Synthesis: making sense across complex stories Transforming the raw interview data into stories was a task for the lead harvesters and the communications team. Together they went through interview transcripts and to pick out key quotes, distill emerging themes, capture perceived outcomes and wider questions. To stay true to the learning history approach and tell each story using interviewees’ words, the main contacts validated the story overall, and each interviewee approved their quotes.

Then there are all these levels of verifying the story. We start with a hypothesis of the narrative and go through all the interviews to find the evidence. The next verification level is on the overall story and individual quotes with interviewees and programme partners. And then we have a third level of verification, when we look across all stories and we ask: are these themes relevant? Wiebke Herding

Don’t underestimate the time and resources you need. The writing process needs two people involved (the writer and the lead harvester). The development of the narrative form was also influenced by the design and vice versa. Because we were developing a totally new product I think we underestimated just how time-consuming and involved the whole process would be. The editing, validation and sign-off is just as involved as the sensemaking and the writing. I’d say you need to allow sufficient time for all. Chloe Dyson

Throughout the harvesting phase, the team held conversations to provide direction for story focus, highlight emerging themes and questions for second round interviews. Once all the stories had been drafted, a more in-depth sensemaking process looked across the finished stories to draw out overarching themes.

The quality of the stories is undeniable. I think there’s a lot of really good and interesting information coming out of these stories. Another positive from this is that you’ve been able to engage a really wide group of stakeholders from quite disparate parts of the ICF doing quite disparate things, in disparate regions and countries. It’s managed to get people engaged, investing time and with a willingness to participate in this process. That’s no easy thing. James Alawi I really value the integrity of the stories in that we were very true, as best as we could, to people’s actual voices and words. Russell Cook


To me it was really interesting that our initial list of ten themes were mainly related to process. Those are often the hard things to implement in practice, even though they might sound simple, like building a partnership. At the same time, people were looking for more content. They were interested in the technical advice. We were holding that tension constantly during the synthesis phase. Juliane Nier I feel the engagement plan became really useful when we started looking at the synthesis and the overall piece. We got some really good insights and if we had done more on communicating little and often, then we could have tested our engagement insights much more. Chloe Dyson

I really enjoyed seeing the development of the ten themes as a prototyping process. At times someone went came in and said ‘Oh something’s not quite right but I can’t really tell you why.’ Every time this happened we reflected, discussed, surfaced more information and produced a next iteration. Going into the overall sensemaking process with an appreciative approach and an approach of ‘yes and’ was so important. Wiebke Herding At times it was difficult to balance the depth and richness of the stories and the generalised themes about planning and implementing sustainable development in practice. One thing I’m grappling with is this question around balancing sufficient detail to draw out the richness while making the stories sufficiently accessible. There’s an over-risk of being a bit reductionist in it. So when we brought that into ten themes and the way in which you can draw themes from across all of the stories, you’re naturally coming down to what are the basic things they have in common? And you’re not actually getting much new. So it’s that challenge of balancing the richness that’s contained the stories and the themes that are coming out of them while still making them accessible. James Alawi I like the synthesis piece, yes, but it hasn’t been tested with people. I did test one or two of the emerging principles with people. I think they’re great, but other people said, ‘Oh, well this is motherhood and apple pie.’ On the other hand motherhood and apple pie is really important, and if you’re not getting the ingredients right for your motherhood and apple pie, there are implications for the design and management of investments. There is something here I need to work through with others about how these overarching messages inform our practice, this is work in progress. Jane Clark

The learning journey Engagement: learning in conversations with different audiences Once the stories were drafted, the team shared them informally with relevant stakeholders in DFID. Early responses to the stories have been mainly positive. I like the quality of the stories, they’re really unusual. You rarely see stories like that in our world; you see case studies, which really focus on the ‘what’, and rarely focus on the human stories, the voices or that kind of tacit knowledge that you were trying to bring out, that experience. They’re very rare, they’re very readable, and the short little introduction at the front is really well written, and it kind of draws you in. Jane Clark At the Lunch & Learn, one of the evaluation team comment on how she really enjoyed seeing the quotes and human stories; she felt the story really complimented and brought to life some of the evaluation findings. Rachel Phillips We’ve tested them out with one or two people and on the whole, at the moment, the feedback is positive, and people are saying, ‘Woah, this is nice.’ I was a bit nervous that people would say, ‘I don’t understand this; it’s just a load of quotes,’ and I thought, “Urgh.” But that hasn’t come back. It’s still a bit soon, and as we share them more, I will listen to how more people react to them. Jane Clark Beyond the internal socialising of the stories within DFID, the team organised two informal workshops (“Lunch & Learn”) to test the ten themes. The first was a one hour session for the Resilience Community of Practice which used the themes as an entry point to compare and contrast two of the resilience stories. The second was an Energy Lunch & Learn – the fourth in a series of learning workshops for the energy cadre – and focused on GET FiT.


It was interesting to contrast two different stories and bring the themes to life through illustrating them and showing what they looked like in practice. It was great having the main contacts on the call and being able to answer questions together with them. It brought a lot of credibility to the stories and the process. Juliane Nier There were a lot of people who attended and keen to engage with the programme story and asked a lot of good questions about the programme. At the end this led to discussions that people arranged to follow up with afterwards, sparked by our GET FiT story, but about their own work. That showed us, I think, that these stories can be really good stimulants for conversations: people bring in their own inquiries and make connections - which was our intention; to create a ‘ripple effect’ of dialogues. Russell Cook Someone came up to me and gave me feedback afterwards and said, ‘despite this piece of work, they couldn’t tell us whether the programme was a success or not.’ I pointed out that, ‘that’s not what we’re trying to do. It’s an appreciative inquiry looking at how it actually happened, what it was that enabled the programme to come into existence, or what it was that enabled the programme to work.’ I guess what people got from the discussion was a really reflective look back at what it was that enabled the programme to work. James Alawi

The purpose of the Lunch & Learn sessions was to link up with existing networks and people who have an interest in the work, will champion it and share it with others. We joined up with a community who were really interested in knowing about the ‘GET Fit’ programme, and it was part of a wider community of practice. We were feeding their learning loop, that’s why we got such a buzz out of that one. So a lesson for me is that if you can tap into an existing group that has got energy in it, you’re going to go further than if you just bring a group of people into the room. Jane Clark One of the principles set out in the engagement plan was to communicate little and often. However, this was difficult to do until the stories were completely finished and agreed. We’re quite early in a phase of experimenting how best to use the stories and themes to engage people’s learning. And because we ran out of time that experiment may or may not proceed, but that’s where we are. John Colvin One thing I’ve been struck with is that by having stories that are in different places, or not altogether at one point, means we were less comfortable sharing them. You want to keep people on the hook and keep people engaged and when you’ve got products to do that with it’s easier. James Alawi We started out really well and got the seeds of some really good stuff. But we were too ambitious and haven’t been able to do as much wider engagement as we had hoped. So that’s almost the next step that we now need to think about. Rachel Phillips

Overall reflections Throughout the Sustainable Development Learning Dialogue project design and implementation process a number of reflections have come up around adaptive management, the value of multidisciplinary teams, timelines and emergence, connections versus collections, organisational learning and the relationship between learning and M&E. The core project team (within and outside DFID) has taken a very collaborative and co-creative approach to the Sustainable Development Learning Dialogue. The project started at a time when there was a focus on adaptive management within DFID, providing an opportunity to work in an iterative way with the DFID team. During the inception phase the team agreed a detailed workplan outlining activities, milestones and outputs. These were revisited regularly throughout the project implementation and tested against the changing context to see if they are still fit for purpose. I keep getting struck with the team’s ability to take stock, reflect and re-prioritise on what’s best for the next stage. So when we were thinking about crafting the stories, ‘Okay, so what is it we want... Coming back to our stakeholders, how we’re reaching them, what’s the best way to draft these stories?’ I guess it’s the phrase ‘slow down to speed up’. It’s very difficult when you’re under a lot of time pressure and when you’ve got a lot of challenges. That’s something that the team does really well. Most people rush and get things out of the door, but actually taking that time to take stock and reflect is good. James Alawi It was really important with this piece of work, that we were adaptive and able to respond to ongoing changes in the DFID context and to what was emerging as the programme progressed. At times, this meant changing our approach from what we had originally planned or reworking something several times or recognising that we needed to slow down in places, which messed up our timeline! Holding the team together as we went through this emergent, shifting plan was not always easy. Rachel Phillips


In response to the DFID tender document for the Sustainable Development Learning Dialogue Talik & Co. assembled a multidisciplinary team of six experienced learning and communications practitioners. Particularly in the beginning of the project, the size of the team could feel a bit big and unwieldy. However, throughout the implementation of the different project phases, the multidisciplinary team could offer a more versatile delivery by drawing on team members’ expertise during the activities of harvesting, story crafting, communications and design, mapping and engagement of audiences or pressure testing from a sustainable development content angle.

As with many participatory process, the programme required more time than originally anticipated. The ambitious timeline to complete the Sustainable Development Learning Dialogue within six months proved to be unrealistic and kept shifting backwards from inception and throughout implementation. On reflection this goes back to the experimental nature of the Sustainable Development Learning Dialogue and testing a new approach to working with emergent learning. At the same time this was also influenced by the time it took to reach project and implementing partners for interviews and validate quotes and story narratives.

What’s been most effective is the element of cocreation, and the diverse team that we’ve had on the case. I’ve always felt a bit nervous that this piece of work could seems quite ‘fat’, but all the disciplines that people were bringing into the team (academic, leadership, learning, design and communications, organisational context and insight and programme management) was key to the quality of the work. Jane Clark

Sometimes it’s easy to think this kind of work can be done quickly - ‘oh it’s just a couple of interviews - that won’t take long’. But in retrospect, we underestimated the complexity of the approach and just how much time it takes to engage and follow up with multiple stakeholders and to craft stories to strike a balance between the richness of our conversations and a level of brevity and accessibility for our target audiences who weren’t there with us in those conversations. Rachel Phillips

When we set up the project team initially, we thought of the design as an expense. But in practice the design and creative process has been – and needed to be – an integral part of the entire project. Given the scale of this project I think I would have managed this differently: ideally we would have made our designer part of the core project team from the beginning. Chloe Dyson

The validation and the ethics that we brought to this are really important and have made our stories more robust. The challenge of trying to get the attention of very busy people was not easy - and also trying to ensure a variety of voices across the entire lifetime of programme lifespans - but was worth it in the end. Russell Cook

Particularly in the beginning of the project I felt a bit out of place as I had very little involvement in the audience mapping, drafting of the engagement plan or project management. Once we started the harvesting of stories, the sensemaking and Lunch & Learns I felt like I had arrived in my role and could really leverage my expertise. Juliane Nier

I am very aware that everybody in the team has put in more energy and work than what we budgeted for, I’m very thankful for that, because we all see it as important, and it’s a pilot and we all think there is a win-win for us all somewhere in it. It’s not just another piece of work. It has been energising. Jane Clark

Another theme that ran throughout every stage of this process was the principle of Connections, not Collections. An emphasis on building relationships, networks and connections enabled the team to identify programmes to work with, engage the diverse range of stakeholders for each and seed the stories into DFID both informally and in the Lunch & Learns. What allows this project to live on is actually that we have created this collection of stories and emerging themes. We have done the connections through interviews, Lunch & Learns and workshops. The artefacts we have produced can now be used with these connections in the future. It’s about daring to write things down and daring to commit and prioritise key messages. Wiebke Herding We spent a lot of time building quality relationships. Our scoping calls [with the programmes], where we basically introduced the Dialogues and asked them about how this could be interesting to them, were very positive. Some people got really excited about this work and it helped us establish a good relationship to build from. Russell Cook The Sustainable Development Learning Dialogue has helped test an approach to organisational learning in practice. Already the Learning for Change Dialogue highlighted that learning can be facilitated by an outsider team or practitionerled. Particularly the harvesting and story drafting phase were led by the outsider team, whereas more interaction from the insider team was required during the audience mapping and engagement and sharing of outputs.


The DFID people were only involved in a part of this process - the external team had all the touchpoints. One thing that would’ve been fantastic would be if we’d all experienced the conversations - if it had been a bit more of a shared learning journey, then it would have been incredibly powerful. Then it would have been incredibly powerful, but in practical you’re rarely going to be able to get that. Jane Clark Annika joined us for all the interviews in Nepal. She didn’t take a lead role - more introducing us and framing the dialogue and then sitting & listening. It was really helpful for her as she had just joined the programme herself at one point she commented on what an amazingly rich induction opportunity it was and to very quickly learn so much about the whole history and evolution of the programme as she worked on the next iteration and designs of its future, as well as building several valuable connections with people. Russell Cook One of my biggest AHA moments was realising that you can ‘outsource’ certain parts of your learning. The harvesting and capturing of reflections can be done by an outsider team. However, the sensemaking and engagement stages require hands-on interaction from the person, organisation or team who want to learn. Drawing out and articulating learnings can be done for you but contextualising those learnings and putting them into action is what needs to be done by you. Juliane Nier

Delivering a project that works with emergent learning in practice resulted in rich explorations of the relationship between monitoring and evaluation (M&E) and learning, which was highlighted as an ongoing question during the Learning for Change Dialogue. Through the process, discussions about the approach, underpinning methodologies and outputs, helped the team explore questions around robustness, the role of human voices and perceptions, resonance and narrative, and the relationship between evidence and best practice versus probing into patterns and emerging practice. In Nepal I met a DFID manager who was doing an annual review, and when she heard about our approach and what we were trying to do she said to me: ‘This is great. I have so much information about what makes these programmes really work, like the time we spend building quality relationships and trust. There’s just no clear box for in the annual review for it that does it justice.’ So, there are lots of valuable things that we have in our programmes on the ground and in country offices that just don’t get fully valued. Russell Cook What we’ve got here through the learning dialogues is actually something practical you can show: ‘This is how we’ve approached it. This is the way we’re taking it forward. Look at this as an approach.’ This isn’t an evaluation. This isn’t done in terms of accountability. It’s an appreciative inquiry looking at how a programme worked in practice. James Alawi

Closing thoughts With the portfolio of stories, the themes emerging from them and the first few conversations, the Sustainable Development Learning Dialogue has created a platform for DFID to continue learning about how it can implement sustainable development in practice. We’ve done a great job of capturing some of DFID’s experience on the ground. Where I’d love to see this go next is for DFID to really pressure test some of what’s come out of this - to look at where it can be useful to them and to find opportunities to try out and test some of the emerging practices in the design and implementation of new programmes. Rachel Phillips The onus was on the stories and so we haven’t done as much on the engagement as we had hoped. That’s still up for grabs. There is a whole communication and engagement plan just waiting to be put into action. What I would really like to know is how people engage with the information we put out there. Chloe Dyson.

I think the first thing we’ve got to do out of this project is to revisit our engagement plan. There are still more messages in this work which we can mine, providing insights for different and surprising audiences. We need to revisit our engagement plan in the light of insights.

Jane Clark

Rachel Phillips

Another example is that this work informed the learning strategy for the ICF. It’s a simple document that says, at a strategic level, across this large portfolio, ‘Learning is important to us.’ And we’ve got a body of work now that sits underneath it and shows why we need a learning strategy. Jane Clark We have an opportunity to feed into some of the other ICF programmes which are building in really strong learning components - like BRACED, CDKN and MEL - looking at creative ways we can do learning, and what we have learnt from this process about what worked and what didn’t work so well. How can they use some of the approaches or principles that we’ve trialled here? James Alawi A question this process now raises for me: how does DFID take this approach and create more spaces that more easily bring about conversations, more often, about what people are experiencing on the ground? Russell Cook How can we use this as a way to increase reflective practice across the organisation? It’s still very early. I genuinely don’t know how far I can say this has been a success or not in terms of helping DFID learn about sustainable development. What we’ve got are seven really good case studies that draw out some really interesting lessons around how DFID did sustainable development in these particular places. I think it is very much about how we use these subsequently. James Alawi

References

M&C Saatchi (April 2015). Final Presentation: DFID Climate Change Learning. Available from Sophie Lawson, [email protected]

Lead International (May 2015). Learning for a Low Carbon Climate Resilient Society. Available for download from cdkn.org


Starting to hear the reactions to the stories, and the approach we have taken both with DFID and the other programme stakeholders, I sense a lot of momentum building. The portfolio of stories are already acting like catalysts, showing alternative possibilities, triggering more dialogue, learning and hopefully action.

Annika Olsson (August 2015). Climate smart development - how to integrate climate finance. Available at prezi.com

Appendix and acknowledgements

Appendix 1: Reflections on the Sustainable Development Learning Dialogue: methodology, methods and praxis John Colvin

2. Facilitating organisational learning – the bigger design picture

1. Introduction In the Learning Reflection we reflect as an insider/outsider team on our experiences of designing and facilitating the Sustainable Development Learning Dialogue (SDLD). It provides a story of what we did – focusing on five phases (inception, harvesting, sensemaking, synthesis and engagement) – and concludes with some overall reflections about the SDLD as a process.

The stories and themes presented earlier in this report were written for the purpose of stimulating a dialogue within DFID and with its partners about how to improve sustainable development in practice. But we understand that our contribution is also part of a broader initiative - to improve the ways in which DFID learns as an organisation. As the SDLD has itself been an experiment in learning, in this annex we provide more detail on the approach we took to the SDLD, and our reflections on the process. We begin by briefly sketching in some historical background.

During the SDLD some of those we spoke to within DFID and DECC showed a particular interest in the methodology and methods underlying our approach. Underpinning this interest were questions of what we meant when we spoke of a ‘learning dialogue’ and ‘learning approaches’, including how these are similar or different to learning aspects of Who might find this of interest? monitoring and evaluation (M&E) practices. These questions were already bubbling up during This annex has been written specifically for those the development of DFID’s Learning for Change within DFID and DECC with a practical interest in the work which immediately preceded the SDLD design of learning processes, particularly those processes supporting sustainable development in where DFID had run a dialogue with stakeholders practice. Our intended audience comprises specialised to understand more fully how they learn (Panel individuals and teams who are seeking to deepen their 1), and had also become of central interest within a larger initiative running parallel to the SDLD, the understanding and practice of quality and choice in learning design. These may include individuals ICF Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) preparing a contract which includes a learning programme.

The origins of the SDLD lie in more than 5 years’ investment by DFID to become more climate smart, and to build its ‘fitness for the future’. DFID’s path towards greater ‘future fitness’ in turn highlighted a a number of core capabilities, including leadership, change management and learning.i Jane Clark was central to this work, which later led to several other learning initiatives which have supported DFID’s recent work on climate change and sustainable development (Figure 1). As shown in the ‘tree diagram below, Jane’s understanding is that all this work is inter-connected, with small pilots such as the SDLD feeding into a broader learning journey as DFID learns from these. Figure 1. Jane Clark’s ‘tree diagram’

component, or those, as in the ICF MEL programme, who are seeking to broaden their learning approaches

DFID therefore asked us to write a piece about in the context of complex programmes. our methodology and methods, which could be added to this document as an annex. A particular focus of this piece is on how we understand quality and rigour within our approach to the SDLD. In response, our attempt openly to share our methodology, practice and methods is motivated by a desire to contribute to this quality and rigour. We have also tried in this piece to unpack what we mean by organisational learning and how we have gone about it, and to reflect further on the methodologies and methods chosen. Our overall aim is to stimulate dialogue within DFID about the value of the methods and methodologies we have drawn upon, and to make these approaches accessible to others who might wish to work with them. Panel 1. Principles for effective learning within DFID

Two learning initiatives within DFID which immediately preceding the SDLD included work which focused on developing principles of ‘Learning for Change’ (Panel 1), and work by M&C Saatchi on developing communication outputs that can support learning (Table 1). Following these, in early 2015 DFID decided 1


2

to test these principles by experimenting with and piloting a participatory approach to learning about implementation of sustainable development – the SDLD. With a review of its International Climate Fund (ICF) portfolio just starting, a focus on learning about implementation of sustainable development was felt to be timely. Reflecting on this decision, the following objectives of the SDLD were agreed:

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1. To craft and share seven learning stories of emerging practice from the ICF in order to demonstrate how sustainable development can be successfully implemented on the ground, including what works well, and why; 2. To develop conversations around these stories as the participatory means to stimulate learning among policy makers and practitioners, with the aim of enriching the DFID narrative on sustainable development with real examples from our programmes; and 3. To pilot a participatory approach to learning about implementation of sustainable development to inform the design of future efforts to learn from the ICF portfolio (e.g. MEL).

Working in co-creative ways, with a focus on ‘the emerging future’ – that is, noticing when and how new forward thinking insights and practices develop as a result of collaboration, and how small, local changes, as they become connected, can form into ‘emergent phenomena’ whose power and influence can far exceed any sum of the separate efforts.

Figure 2. Diagram showing the variety of learning traditions that informed the SDLD approach. Those that are shaded in the diagram played a primary role.

Table 1. DFID’s principles for communicating climate change (drawing on the work of M&C Saatchi) People learn in in different ways

Audience first, output second

People feel out of the loop and on the back foot

The report shouldn’t be the first thing for your audience

People gravitate towards human stories and concrete examples

Humanise the data

People want a relationship rather than a report

No dissemination without conversation

People need help deciding what it’s worth spending their time on

Provide navigation (not customisation)

Climate change is framed as a global environmental problem not a local development solution

Speak their language

For those that want/ need to learn, many aren’t sure where to start

Here to help…

This broader framing of organisational learning was an important design consideration for us. The terms of reference had asked for a small team comprising learning practitioners and communications specialists with experience of participative processes. We were also required to develop an approach and methodology which “built on the latest DFID work around learning approaches and collection and synthesis of evidence” (as presented for example in panel 1), and to demonstrate an “appreciative inquiry style of approach to identifying what works in practice”.ii This resulted in us forming a team which drew on a mix of traditions in learning and participatory practice, as shown in Figure 2 below.

We agreed that we would not be trialling: an iterative process of learning with the story holders, guided by a learning question (one of the Learning for Change principles); an alternative to evaluation or qualitative research.

This annex focuses in greater depth on those traditions that were foregrounded in the SDLD. We note that while there are synergies between some of these traditions, there are also methodological differences and tensions.

Our story of how this participatory approach to learning unfolded in practice is presented in chapter 5 and involved a series of phases, sometimes overlapping or concurrent:

In terms of piloting a participatory approach to learning about implementation of sustainable development, we agreed early on that we would be trialling:  The application of principles from the ‘Learning for Change’ work to enable learning across the ICF portfolio of over 200 projects;  The application of principles from the M&C Saatchi communications work to enhance uptake of learning;  Identifying and engaging a set of relevant practitioners to learn from and with;  Identifying, prioritising and understanding key audiences to learn with and for;  Creating feedback loops from practice on the ground to ICF strategy, policy, portfolio and programme design;  Participatory approaches to learning and uptake; 3


1.

‘Inception’ (Inquiring, listening and framing). Begin by listening to the needs of the client and our SDLD stakeholders, and frame the intervention around these.

2.

‘Harvesting’ (Investigating and crafting). Gather and elicit experiences, reflections and insights from seven ICF programmes selected for their focus on different aspects of sustainable development in practice. Craft seven stories of sustainable development in practice.

3.

Sensemaking and synthesis. Develop a broader picture of emerging approaches to sustainable development by identifying themes that run across the seven stories. Notice patterns, similarities and differences that may offer further insights and sources of learning.

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4.

‘Engagement’ (Diffusing and sharing). Engage different groups in a dialogue around the stories and themes as means to stimulate the development of practical know-how. Use the dialogue to strengthen understanding and its application in sustainable development policy making and practice.

3. Our approach to the SDLD The purpose of this annex is to share our approach in greater depth, to offer reflections on its quality, and to reflect on the experimentation that SDLD is opening up. Yet there are many ways of presenting our ‘approach’. In chapter 5 we started by telling a story of how we went about the SDLD, introducing the activities that made up our SDLD work, recounting how these were clustered in phases, and weaving our reflections on these activities into the narrative. Activities that make up an intervention are sometimes referred to as ‘praxes’. The word ‘praxis’ highlights that the things we do (our ‘practices’) are shaped in part by our experiences, but also by our understanding of what we are doing, in other words by theories. ‘Praxis’ therefore means theory-based practice.iii

Reflectioniv: Different members of the insider/outsider team had very different experiences and understandings of these different methodologies. This led to creative and mainly generative tensions within our praxis as we drew on the different methodologies and methods to make sense of what we were doing and wanted to do. The dynamic quality of our conversations included sensing, frequent co-creation and at times deep listening – resulting, in our view, in significant added value in terms of the quality of output, and more than justifying the additional costs of time and money involved.

Working in complex situations as demanded by the SDLD means that it is not appropriate simply to transfer particular methods, or even particular methodologies, that have been ‘tried and tested’ elsewhere. The particular dynamics, politics, uncertainties and inter-dependencies of complex situations instead require that we work creatively, more in the manner of a ‘bricoleur’ than a technician. Experiences, capabilities, methodologies and methods are all part of this mix – hence the value of a word like ‘praxis’ to signify this type of approach. And yet if we are to share our approach with others, so that they too may learn from, reflect upon and/or evaluate this, then we need to give an account of our praxis, highlighting not only what happened (as we did in chapter 5), but also what methodologies and methods we drew upon, and the criteria by which we selected them.

Learning historyv

This is what we set out to do in this annex. First we discuss the main methodologies that shaped our approach. We then offer a set of criteria which are compatible with these methodologies and which we drew on in making choices about methods. A section on our methods then follows. Finally, we offer some reflections on the development of the learning dialogue and the trialling of our participatory learning approach. We end with some recommendations. In keeping with what we aim to cover, we have chosen a narrative style for this annex which is more analytical and perhaps more academic than the preceding chapters of the report, but also seeks to weave in story. …the whole point of complex systems [is] that you can’t have standard approaches, only connected, agile people able to respond and improvise. Duncan Green, 2014

In developing our story-based approach, one of the methodologies we drew on is a tradition known as learning history. Working with story as a narrative form, learning history is an action research approach to learning that was originally developed by management scholars George Roth and Art Kleiner at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1990s and has been applied in a variety of commercial, educational and organisational settings since then. The focus of a learning history is on finding out ‘what it was really like’ for people involved in an initiative or programme. The idea is that we learn best from the messy on-the-ground realities, and by getting below the surface and into some of the more hidden aspects of what makes particular initiatives more successful than others The output is typically a written learning history that tells the story by drawing in direct quotes from those involved and combining these perspectives with reflections, analysis and questions from a researcher. So a learning history is not a cleaned-up account or well-honed case study, which can often come across as de-contextualised and rather dry. It is instead an engaging approach to learning that is generally enjoyable and thought-provoking for those involved. Learning history gets us past listing best practice and into the thinking, experimentation and arguments of those who have encountered the situation. George Roth and Art Kleiner, 1998

Bricoleurs were travelling nineteenth century rural craftsmen in France skilled in using and adapting tools at hand, but with, as well, a sense of inventiveness and creativity for purposeful intervention – the art of bricolage. Matthew Quinn Patton, 2010

4. Methodological underpinnings We begin by describing the principal methodologies which shaped our approach. Methodologies provide the theoretical underpinning for understanding which set of methods might best be applied in a particular organisational and political context. 5


Before introducing these methodologies, it should be noted that none of these were followed in its ‘pure’ sense. Rather, as ‘bricoleurs’, we drew from these methodologies on what was most useful in the context of SDLD, to inform both our individual and collective praxes. Furthermore, different members of our team brought expertise in different methodologies. Again, we drew on this in shaping the work throughout the SDLD, speaking together regularly and to an extent working things out as we proceeded, based on the iterative and emergent principles of social learning. Alongside ‘social bricolage’, ‘mashup’ would be a popular way of describing the resultant outcome; a more scientific term would be to talk of transdisciplinary practice. Our transdisciplinary approach included working both as an ‘outsider’ team of six consultants, and as an outside/insider team through a collaboration between the consultants and a core DFID team of two.

A learning history is also a systemic process in that it engages a range of stakeholder voices, who bring different perspectives on the delivery of a programme. By reflecting and sense making to learn from their experience, a learning history has the benefit of generating learning amongst these programme stakeholders, as well as for other audiences. The different insights and perspectives are brought together into a story told through multiple narratives, with illustrations and reflections on strategies, noticeable results, tensions and complexities, what happened and why. These narratives are intended not only to engage the audience but also to stimulate a personal response from the reader/listener. This can be particularly useful in learning about complex endeavours, such as sustainable development in 6

Another strong feature of these traditions is a focus on ‘emergence’ – that is, noticing when and how new insights and practices develop as a result of collaboration, and how small, local changes, as they become connected, can form into ‘emergent phenomena’ whose power and influence can far exceed any sum of the separate efforts. Indeed, ‘design’ in systemic inquiry traditions is understood as an iterative and emergent rather than fully pre-planned process:

practice, where it is the finer details of human endeavour which make the difference between something being remembered and taken up and something that is easily forgotten. A good story and a well-formed argument are different natural kinds. Both can be used as a means for convincing another, yet what they convince is fundamentally different: arguments convince one of their truth, stories of their lifelikeness. Jerome Bruner, 1988

We understand design for transformational innovation as an ongoing and emergent process which, while drawing on an initial praxis and plan, is also shaped by continuous cycles of action learning and adaptation. Indeed some would argue that design in this sense can only ever be understood in retrospect - that is, on reflection. John Colvin and Mehjabeen Abidi-Habib, 2013

Learning history is however not all about the written document. As important as the reflective process of creating the learning history is the subsequent discussion and analysis of it. It is through this active process of engagement that a wider, more lasting learning can be stimulated.

Systemic inquiry approaches are also particularly well suited to working in complex situations that may be characterised as much by uncertainties, ambiguities and ignorance as by the more easily quantified understandings of ‘risk’:

Recent developments in learning history have recognised the catalytic nature of learning history within the wider system…The open system learning history places the ‘artefact’ at the heart of a learning process that extends outwards to include face-to-face inquiry but that can also, in its way, speak for itself in a third-person context. Margaret Gearty, 2015 Systemic inquiry – Working with dialogue across complex institutional settings Given the organisational complexity of the context we were working in, another set of traditions we drew on was a set of organisational and wider systemic learning traditions which include social learning, whole system development and systemic inquiry (see Figure 2). All are rooted in dialogue and a primary focus of these traditions is that they engage with learning that is embedded in conversations across complex and dynamic organisational systems and networks. Conversations are the way [people] discover what they know, share it with their colleagues and in the process create new knowledge for the organisation. In the new economy, conversations are the most important force of work….so much so that the conversation is the organisation. Alan Webber, 1993

Although perhaps relatively unfamiliar to DFID, many communities of practice that draw on these methodologies have developed in the context of sustainable development and climate change in recent years. The Climate Change and Social Learning (CCSL) initiative within the CGIAR family provides one example of an organisation seeking to embrace these ways of working, thinking and learning.vi The team drew on these traditions throughout the SDLD. For example, while we developed a design for the SDLD that included an initial framework, our collaborative, iterative and flexible way of working also encouraged new insights and approaches to the SDLD to emerge as needed.

There are many other features that are shared across this broad family of social and systemic learning traditions. All seek to engage with multiple perspectives and to foster co-creative learning that arises out of different perspectives. With differences of perspective come differences of power, and systemic learning traditions seek to bridge as well as mediate across gradients of power. ‘Learning about learning’ is another feature of these approaches, which invite the skill of ‘reflexive practice’ that is highlighted in some of our stories – for example the CRGE story from Ethiopia. Social learning…entails looped learning: it goes beyond searching for more efficient solutions to a problem (single loop learning), to considering the theory and assumptions guiding those solutions and looking for new types of solutions (double loop learning), and ideally on to considering how we learn to learn and find more effective ways of coming up with dynamic, context-based, ever adaptive and proactive solutions to the endless series of new complex problems that arise (triple loop learning). Ewen Le Borgne and colleagues, 2014

Appreciative inquiry “Demonstrating an appreciative inquiry style of approach to identifying what works in practice” was a further requirement of the ToR, and a core methodology which flowed through much of our work, including our interviewing, our narrative weaving & framing of stories, and our synthesis work drawing out emerging insights and themes. Appreciative inquiry (AI) was first developed in the mid-1980s by David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva, building on traditions of social constructionism, action research, appreciative systems and positive mental imagery. Since this time, AI has developed into a number of different schools. One school, which emerged during the 1990s placed a much stronger focus on positivity, developing into what is often presented as a 4-step approach to organisational change which focuses on strengths rather than weaknesses, by “asking questions that strengthen a [living] system’s capacity to apprehend, anticipate and heighten positive potential”. Critics of this approach to AI question the capacity of living systems to flourish without effective engagement with both positive and negative feedback, noting that we often learn as much from failure as from success. Others argue that such an approach to AI neglects the influence of social systems that reproduce hegemonic systems of power over group members’ consciousness, cautioning that “happy desires” should not displace “unhappy actualities” because this

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[What we need] are narratives that recognise a wider range of dynamic properties of sustainability – such as those emphasising adaptation, flexibility and agility. Amidst such dynamics, we have also argued for a move beyond treating situations only in terms of calculable risk, to embrace narratives and potential pathways which can address other forms of incomplete knowledge: uncertainty, ambiguity and ignorance. Melissa Leach, Ian Scoones and Andy Stirling, 2010

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increases the risk of colluding with the status quo and inhibits social change. This tradition is also in tension with many elements of systemic inquiry presented above, where reflexivity is understood to draw on critical as well as appreciative evaluation of experience, and social learning can involve agonistic as well as collaborative interactions. Likewise learning principle #9: ‘Fail fast to succeed sooner’ (see Panel 1) would be in contradiction with this view of AI. A second school of AI which we have drawn upon takes a more nuanced approach, recognising that while “the questions we ask are critical to the world we create”, and that there is substantial value in framing situations positively, this can also include looking positively at failure, including what doesn’t work and why.

5. Criteria for assessing quality and rigour in our methodological approach During the SDLD we were challenged by members of the DFID and DECC evaluation and research communities to clarify the relationship between our methodologies, M&E and research approaches. M&E and research also produce evidence which underpins learning. How then were our methodologies, also focusing on learning, similar or different to learning approaches in M&E or research practice? And what criteria did we bring to our work that ensured quality, validity and robustness? Such questions are part of a wider debate that has been taking place within and between DFID and the NGO and academic communities for a number of years. A recent publication from the Big Push Forward conference held in April 2014 provides valuable insights into this debate. A theme has been the discussion of ‘rigour’:

[One approach is to] start with a critical inquiry (CI) to deconstruct experience and then engage critical appreciative processes during the remainder of the AI cycle to construct new experiences. The initial critical inquiry [in effect] establishes which system imperatives [occupy] the life world of participants while subsequent critical-appreciative processes build participants’ aspirations to design new social systems. Rory Ridley-Duff and Graham Duncan (2015) We drew on this more nuanced framing of AI throughout the SDLD. For example, during the stage of crafting the seven learning stories, we sought to work appreciatively with stakeholders to draw out what worked well in their programmes and why, and what they were proud of and enthusiastic about, as well as what didn’t work and what they had learned as a result. We sought to convey an appreciative stance to those we interviewed, not only through our style of conversation and questioning, but also by actively framing the stories as opportunities for constructive and generative learning and by being very clear that we were not engaged in an exercise of accountability-based evaluation (which can carry a very different dynamic around power and judgement). Theory U Theory U is another vital tradition from which we drew many insights in shaping our approach to the SDLD. Theory U now constitutes a major body of leadership and management praxis drawing from the original work of Fritz Glasl and Dirk Lemson, the contribution of organization development consultants over several decades and more than 10 years’ work by Otto Scharmer. Sharmer’s work, which has been widely promoted, focuses on ways of working that create spaces for sensing, co-creation, deep listening, and then prototyping collaborative initiatives that emerge from this – an approach which is consistent also with social learning principles.

While much of the rigour debate focuses on whether data is rigorous, we should focus on seeking more rigorous thought processes and method selection and use … the term ‘rigour’ needs to be reclaimed beyond narrow method-bound definitions to encompass better inclusion of less powerful voices and improved analysis of power, politics, assumptions and resource allocation. Irene Guijt, 2015 In setting out the criteria we ourselves applied in our choice and selection of methods, we drew on two main sources linked to different but overlapping communities of practice from which our methodologies are derived – firstly, qualitative research, and secondly, action research and systemic inquiry. Criteria for quality in qualitative research Many rich discussions of quality can be found in the field of qualitative research. Here we draw on a set of eight ‘big tent’ criteria for excellence in qualitative research, developed by Sarah Tracy: Figure 3. Diagram showing eight ‘big tent’ criteria for excellent qualitative research

Design for communication This final methodology was also selected in response to the ToR, which specified that the SDLD approach should reflect the findings and recommendations of DFID’s principles for communicating climate change. Recognising the value of design thinking, we proposed and developed a design approach to all our communications drawing on a mix of overarching and creative principles, as shown in Annex 4.

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Closely aligned with the notion of crystallization and showing rather than telling, is multivocality. Multivocal research includes multiple and varied voices in the qualitative report and analysis…In addition to providing an empathic understanding, attending to multivocality provides space for a variety of opinions.

While developed for research rather than for more applied learning interventions, we have found these criteria useful in helping us to frame design choices in the SDLD. Here we comment further on the criteria of rich rigour, sincerity, credibility and resonance, as we feel that these are particularly pertinent in the context of the learning history methodology.

Sarah Tracy, 2010

By ‘rich rigour’, Tracy means that a study (or for us, an ‘intervention’) uses sufficient and appropriate theoretical constructs, data and time ‘in the field’, samples, contexts, and processes of data collection and analysis. Here she argues the need for the research approach to be at least as complex, flexible and multifaceted as the phenomena being studied, and that this ‘requisite variety’ (a concept borrowed from cybernetics) leads to richness. Richness is thus generated through a requisite variety of theoretical constructs, data sources, contexts and samples. In addition to its connection to richness, rigour is also concerned with face validity – does a study appear, on its face, to be reasonable and appropriate, and do researchers evidence their due diligence, exercising appropriate time, effort, care and thoroughness? Questions about rigour include the following: -

Did the researcher spend enough time to gather interesting and significant data? Is the context or sample appropriate given the goals of the study? Did the researcher use appropriate procedures in terms of field note style, interviewing practices, and analysis procedures?

‘Sincerity’ means that the intervention is marked by honesty and transparency about the practitioner’s biases, goals, and foibles as well as about how these played a role in the methods, joys, and mistakes of the work. This quality of honesty is closely linked to the quality of self-reflexivity highlighted by action researchers Judi Marshall and Peter Reason in the section that follows. Honesty is also linked to transparency about the design of an intervention, which is marked by disclosure of the intervention’s challenges and unexpected twists and turns and revelation of the ways its foci transformed over time. Indeed, this section of the annex is part of our attempt at both self-reflexivity and transparency. ‘Credibility’ is a key criterion in all research and especially relevant to learning history. Credible reports and narratives are those that readers feel trustworthy enough to act on and make decisions in line with. For quantitative research, credibility is earned through reliability, replicability, consistency, and accuracy. Tracy argues, however, that these criteria only tangentially relate to qualitative research using a human instrument. We would add that such criteria become even more tangential when working with emerging practices in complex contexts. Qualitative credibility is instead achieved through a range of practices which include thick description, triangulation, crystallization, multivocality and partiality: Thick description requires that the researcher account for the complex specificity and circumstantiality of their data…To illustrate data’s complexity, researchers are advised to show, meaning that they provide enough detail that readers may come to their own conclusion about the scene. This is contrasted [with] the author telling the reader what to think. Showing is rhetorically more difficult and usually requires more words than telling.

The criterion of ‘resonance’ is also particularly relevant to learning history, and to the processes of learning it seeks to stimulate. Resonance refers to research’s ability (or in this case a learning story’s ability) to meaningfully reverberate and affect an audience. Thus researchers can engage in practices that will promote empathy, identification and reverberation of the research by readers who have no direct experience of what is being discussed. Resonance is achieved through a number of practices, including aesthetic merit, transferability and naturalistic generalisation: Transferability is achieved when readers feel as though the story of the research overlaps with their own situation and they intuitively transfer the research to their own action. Through the process of naturalistic generalisations, readers make choices based on their own intuitive understanding of the scene, rather than feeling as though the research report is instructing them what to do. Sarah Tracy, 2010 Criteria for choice, quality and inclusive rigour in action research and systemic inquiry The second source we drew on in selecting criteria for choice, quality and rigour is the action research and systemic inquiry traditions. For example, Robert Chambers lists seven ‘canons’ of inclusive rigour for situations that are framed as complex, that is, in which “causality [is] multiple and intertwined, and problems messy, wicked and not amenable to obvious or straightforward solutions”. These canons show many overlaps with the criteria presented above. His focus on inclusive rigour, while not clearly defined, makes several linkages with participatory methodologies and processes. Also of interest is Chamber’s sixth canon – ‘optimal ignorance and appropriate imprecision’ – as this sits in tension with some aspects of Tracy’s ‘rich rigour’: [Optimal ignorance and appropriate imprecision] entail not finding out more than is needed. Reductionist rigour with its set paths is vulnerable to major data overkill…and finding out and measuring much more and more precisely than is needed for practical and policy purposes. This requires judging when successive approximation has gone far enough. Robert Chambers 2015 Action research is another field closely linked with learning history practice that has undertaken extensive work on developing criteria of choice and quality. Peter Reason highlights the following criteria:

Triangulation in qualitative research assumes that if two or more sources of data, theoretical frameworks, types of data collected, or researchers converge on the same conclusion, then the conclusion is more credible…[In a similar vein] crystallization encourages researchers to gather multiple types of data and employ various methods, multiple researchers, and numerous theoretical frameworks. However, it assumes that the goal of doing so is not to provide researchers with a more valid singular truth, but to open up a more complex, in-depth, but still thoroughly partial, understanding of the issue.

(a) To what extent and in what ways does this action research pursue practical purposes? (b) To what extent and in what ways does this action research pursue worthwhile purposes? (c) To what extent and in what ways is this action research designed as a participative and democratic purpose – researching with, for and by people? (d) To what extent and in what ways does this action research encompass many ways of knowing (e) To what extent and in what ways is this action research an emergent process? Further criteria in the action research and systemic inquiry traditions include: 11


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(f) (g) (h) (i) (j)

At the outset of the SDLD this group met for a day-long inception workshop to talk through the programme design and begin to operationalise it. For part of this day a number of additional individuals from DFID and DECC were invited to be part of this process and to contribute. These individuals –Teeg Cahill, Helen Bryer, John Carstensen, Robert Phillips, Alison Pollard, Robert Towers, Julia Raybould, Ben Simuyandi – subsequently became known as the ‘friends’ of the programme. The emphasis in the workshop was on creative thinking and an opportunity to explore and challenge our initial design thinking.

To what extent and in what ways does this work explore and mobilise inter-relationships? To what extent and in what ways does this work engage multiple voices? To what extent and in what ways does this work attend to and critique boundary judgements? To what extent and in what ways does this work engage critical reflexivity? To what extent and in what ways does this work engage critically with issues of power and political economy? Taking an attitude of inquiry implies opening our purposes, assumptions, sense-making and patterns of action to reflection…In this view, quality becomes having, or seeking, a capacity for self-reflection, so that we engage our full vitality in the inquiry and attend to the perspectives and assumptions we are carrying. Judi Marshall and Peter Reason, 2007

Identifying and prioritising key project stakeholders

Reflections on choice quality and rigour in our approach In section 7 of this annex we draw on several of the above criteria to inform our reflections on the quality of our work. First we set out the tools and methods we used in shaping our praxis.

As an organisational learning intervention designed in the context of a large and complex programme – the International Climate Fund (ICF) – it was critical for us to agree early on in the SDLD how we might best ‘work into’ this complexity. Mapping, identifying and prioritising project stakeholders was an early priority for us. The SDLD terms of reference suggested a number of possible stakeholders and we took this as our starting point. Drawing on insights from the inception workshop and a small number of early interviews across DFID and DECC (see below), we then segmented stakeholders into six groups, all of whom have varying degrees of involvement with the ICF: 

6. Learning dialogues – tools and methods

DFID Climate and Environment Advisers, including ICF Senior Responsible Officers (SROs) or programme managers from DFID’s Climate & Environment Department (CED), and DECC Advisers , including ICF Senior Responsible Officers or programme managers from DECC

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We drew on the methodologies above to select and shape the tools and methods that structured the SDLD process. These methods are in turn reflected in our praxis. We outline these methods below.

DFID Technical Specialists, i.e. ICF SROs and programme managers from DFID’s other technical specialisms - such as Economic Advisers, Social Development Advisers, Livelihoods and Humanitarian Advisers

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Tools and methods used during phase 1: ‘Inception’ (inquiring, listening and framing)

Wider Community, i.e. experts and practitioners within DFID and DECC who could be potential ICF SROs



‘Friends’ of the SDLD, i.e. key contacts from within DFID and DECC who have been involved in the inception phase and will continue to help us shape the direction and content of the project



SDLD ‘Practice Holders’, i.e. the SROs and wider teams involved with designing and implementing the seven ICF programmes from which we are crafting stories Senior Management, i.e. the Senior Management Group and ICF Board Members

To achieve the objectives of the SDLD we agreed an overall learning strategy, which was to: 1. Expose (a large number of) people targeted to the project and its learning outputs; 2. Encourage conversations between members of the target audiences, the client and the consultant team about sustainable development and its programming in DFID; 3. Strengthen the feedback loop between programmes on the ground and the overarching policy framework.



The diagram opposite shows the relative size of these six groups:

The purpose of phase 1 was to further shape this learning strategy by: - Identifying, prioritising and beginning to engage with key project stakeholdersvii - Drawing on the perceived needs of the client and these key project stakeholders, frame the intervention in the form of an engagement plan. (During phase 1 we also selected a number of ICF programmes as a basis for story crafting, and developed a ‘sense-making’ framework from which to derive questions for the story harvesting work – these are both introduced in the section below on tools and methods used during phase 2.) Ongoing engagement within an ‘insider/outsider’ inquiry group and with SDLD ‘friends’ The SDLD was designed and delivered by an ‘insider/outsider’ inquiry group comprising a small team within DFID’s Climate and Environment Department (Jane Clark, initially with Annika Olsson and later with James Alawi) and an external teamviii. This group constantly inquired into and shaped the (emerging) design of the SDLD, drawing on the methodologies described above. A core engagement therefore took place within this small group, where social learning processes were continuous.

We then prioritised these stakeholders in terms of how we might seek to engage them, based on a range of learning outputs and modes of interaction:

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Stakeholder group

Learning outputs

Interactive mode (providing for a direct response from or a conversation with stakeholders)

1. DFID Climate and Environment Advisers and DECC (including existing ICF Senior Responsible Officers (SROs) and programme managers)

Primary stakeholders for learning stories Primary stakeholders for the synthesis review

Learning stories emailed to all 70 DFID CED advisers and DECC advisers Illustrated summary of the synthesis review discussed at three Lunch & Learns

2. DFID Technical Specialists (including existing ICF SROs and programme managers)

Primary stakeholders for learning stories

Learning stories emailed to wider network of approx. 200 DFID Technical Specialists who are ICF SROs

3. The Wider DFID/ DECC Community (potential ICF SROs and programme managers) 4. ‘Friends’ of the SDLD

Primary stakeholders for the SDLD introduction

Attendance at one or more project workshops, starting with the inception workshop

5. SDLD Practice Holders

Primary stakeholders for learning stories and the synthesis review

Conversations with the project team form the basis for the learning stories Further interaction through validation of quotes Final learning stories emailed to SDLD Practice Holders

6. DFID Senior Management and ICF Board Members

Primary stakeholders for the SDLD introduction

Project website (provides access to information; however needs to be proactively retrieved)

These interviews helped us shape the prioritisations presented above. They also helped us understand what kinds of learning – in terms of thinking, feeling and doing – different stakeholder groups might be seeking: Stakeholder group

SDLD introduction available on the project website and may be forwarded by Friends of the SDLD Learning stories available on the project website

1. DFID Climate and Environment Advisers and DECC (including existing ICF Senior Responsible Officers (SROs) and programme managers)

2. DFID Technical Specialists (including existing ICF SROs and programme managers)

Synthesis review available on the project website 3. The Wider DFID/ DECC Community (potential ICF SROs and programme managers)

Learning stories and synthesis review as input to senior management conversations facilitated by Jane Clark

Current assumptions

Desired outcomes

Think: “I understand sustainable development but the word has lots of different meanings across DFID. It shouldn’t be used as a sticking plaster for everything it’s more specific than that. There’s some great knowledge and learning out there, how can we connect and share it better from the bottom up?” Feel: Positive about sustainable development, although there is so much still to do. Do: Read short synthesis reports. Like practical learning and more technical information. Think: Sustainable development theory is longstanding you can’t avoid working on it. Areas of preparedness, resilience and risk management are gaining traction. We could do more to share learning. Feel: Sustainable development is making slow progress. Feel strongly about their area of technical specialism; sustainable development must be applied within it. Do: Read easy-to-access summaries or synthesis reports. Like bespoke tools and resources, and gaining more technical expertise. Think: “It’s hard to know what you don’t know. It would be great to have some pointers to help identify the gaps in my knowledge, so the ICF becomes less of a grey area.” Feel: Positive, yet slightly overwhelmed. Under a lot of time pressure. Do: Read short, easy-to-read reports. Would like examples, more technical expertise and more on where to go to find information and evidence.

Think: “While I don’t have all the answers, I can learn with others and we can improve things together.” Feel: More confident, connected and influential. Do: Apply more learning approaches in their work

Think: “This has been a really valuable use of my time; I get how what works and I want to do more of it in practice, while helping others to do the same.” Feel: Confident and empowered Do: Use and promote the principles developed in the Sustainable Development Learning Dialogue and advocate for more learning to be done in this way Think: “I’ve learnt so much more than I thought I would, this will help improve my practice further. My experience informs strategies at the highest level.” Feel: Surprised, appreciated, listened to and influential Do: Use and promote the principles developed in the Sustainable Dialogue Learning Dialogue. Think: “This narrative holds. I trust that I’ll be able to present, defend and apply it because it is based in evidence and practice on the ground. There are ways to work through the complexity and uncertainty surrounding SD.” Feel: Relieved, better informed and energised. Do: Illustrate the narrative on sustainable development with stories from the field.

This table highlights the following prioritisations:  Our primary focus is on the DFID Climate and Environment Advisers, DECC SROs and programme managers, and DFID Technical Specialists  We will also seek to expose the wider DFID/DECC community to the project and its learning outputs  Two groups of people will have a special status in their engagement with the project: - practice holders who participate in interviews and/or workshops during the crafting of the stories of emerging practice; and ‘friends’ of the SDLD who are identified by the DFID project team as particularly important for the project and are invited to workshops and stakeholder conversations.  While Senior Management and ICF Board remain an important audience, the engagement with them needs to be managed internally by the DFID project team. The delivery team will provide learning outputs to assist this process, but not communicate directly.

4. Friends of the SDLD

Think: “I’m interested in the Sustainable Development Learning Dialogue and what it could deliver.” Feel: Curious and engaged. Do: Have been involved with the inception phase of the project, either via meetings or interviews, and would like to stay involved.

5. SDLD Practice Holders

Think: “This is great opportunity to promote my programme and learn something along the way.” Feel: Interested and engaged. Do: Make time to get immersed in the learning process.

Early engagement with key project stakeholders

6. DFID Senior Management and ICF Board Members

Think: “What does sustainable development mean in practice? What’s DFID doing on it and is it working? How can we learn from the practice on the ground and use it to inform policy?” Feel: Frustrated, disconnected and unresolved. There are lots of questions and lots of uncertainty. Do: Not have the examples or evidence to support the theories.

Early on we interviewed a small number of individuals from:  The DFID project team: Jane Clark and Annika Olsson  DFID Climate and Environment Advisers: Sarah Lester  DFID/DECC Technical Specialists and Advisers: Alexis Raichoudhury, Clare McCrum and Dan Ayliffe  Representatives of the wider DFID community: Rubbina Karruna 15


Think: “I’m starting to understand how to juggle the complexity of sustainable development in practice. My experience informs strategies at the highest level.” Feel: Confident, engaged and relevant. Do: Apply the principles developed in the Sustainable Development Learning Dialogue to their programmes

Think: “I’m starting to see there are fields of enquiry to help work through the complexities and I’m starting to consider how I could start making this part of what I do in the future.” Feel: More connected, engaged and curious to learn more. Do: See how the principles developed in the Sustainable Development Learning Dialogue could be relevant to their programmes.

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Reflection: The engagement plan enabled us to bring clarity to the design of phases 2-4 of the SDLD while also providing room for flexibility and emergence. The light touch analysis of what different stakeholder groups might be looking for in terms of their learning about sustainable development proved useful to hold in mind while crafting the learning stories and the synthesis review. Early engagement with friends of the SDLD enabled us to lay the foundations for a social learning process within the Climate and Environment Department. I think that in the design work of this first phase we responded well to DFID’s thinking at the time, building on the Learning for Change and M&C Saatchi principles. There was a strong focus at that time on crafting stories that would be of value to senior policy makers as well as to other audiences, and our work on the segmentation of audiences and the engagement plan helped us to understand where stakeholders were coming from and to prioritise what we wanted to attend to. Annika’s role as the first project manager was important as she could offer the perspective of people we were planning to talk to – SROs. Russell Cook

Tools and methods used during phase 2: ‘Harvesting’ (investigating and crafting) The focus of phase 2 was on gathering and eliciting experiences, reflections and insights from seven ICF programmes selected for their focus on different aspects of sustainable development in practice, and from these, crafting seven stories of sustainable development in practice. This work was strongly shaped by the learning history and appreciative inquiry methodologies, and drew on the following methods:  Selection of ICF programmes as a basis for story crafting  Choosing who to speak with in developing the stories  Developing a set of questions around which to generate and shape the stories  Methods for gathering and eliciting experiences, framings, reflections and insights  Writing and crafting the stories  Development of the narrative form

resilience to climate change;

-

natural resource management



Select a mix of programmes to represent a variety of different (geographical) contexts



Programmes which have been running long enough to offer substantial experience to learn from



Programmes which are of interest to DFID CED and in some cases also to DECC



Programmes with receptive teams on the ground – enthusiastic to engage in this storying and learning process with us



Consistent with a critical appreciative inquiry perspective, select programmes that offer examples of positive devianceix – that is, that are known to have achieved successes along a number of dimensions

Programme name

Sustainable development focus

Beneficiary location

In-depth or lighter touch?

Forestry management

Natural resources management

Ghana

Lighter touch (remote)

6

Productive Safety Net Programme

Resilience

Ethiopia


6

Managing climate risks for the urban poor

Resilience

South & South East Asia


4

Developing resilience to climate change in the Caribbean

Resilience

Caribbean


10

Nepal Climate Change Support Programme

Resilience

Nepal

In-depth (site visit)

13

GET FiT

Low carbon

Uganda


8

Climate Resilient Green Economy

Transformational growth, low carbon and resilience

Ethiopia


17

The insider/outsider inquiry group (‘core team’) agreed at the outset that there was a balance to strike between crafting a variety of more lightly told stories, offering a diversity of focus and context, and working in greater depth with fewer stories. Working within the constraints of time and budget, we agreed to develop 7 stories, with three focusing in greater depth and four with a lighter touch. We also agreed the following criteria as a basis for the selection of ICF programmes for storying: Programmes designed to address one or more of the following sustainable development themes: 17

Total number of actors engaged

Choosing who to speak with in developing the stories As a basis for crafting each story we undertook interviews (and in some cases workshops) with a number of key actors involved in the relevant DFID/DECC programme (see below). As we couldn’t speak with everyone involved in a programme, we had to make choices around who to speak with. These choices, including the numbers involved, were bounded by three criteria for inclusive rigour in complex situations developed by Adinda Van Hemelrijk and Irene Guijt: -

Selection of ICF programmes as a basis for story crafting


low carbon development;

-

The seven projects we selected have already been introduced and narrated in chapter 4 of this report. The table below shows those programmes where we applied a more in depth approach and those where we applied a more light-touch approach:

However I do think we were overambitious with the resources and time we had available. I think we lost an important opportunity at the inception workshop by not insisting this was for the insider/outsider team only and that we used this to think through priorities and roles better. As a result, we ended up taking more time to navigate different audiences and refocusing priorities – for example we did a lot of detailed work on the engagement plan that in retrospect took a lot longer than anticipated; and as an outsider team we were left to do too much of the political work of contacting people for the stories, which at times took more time than expected. Russell Cook



-

-

Rigour – speaking to a sufficient number of individuals to gain breadth of perspective and experience, and triangulation of key themes and events; Inclusiveness – speaking to sufficient numbers of SDLD practice holders in order to foster direct engagement in the learning process Feasibility – working within the limits of time and budget.

Drawing on these three broad criteria we agreed the following specific criteria to shape the selection of individuals to speak with: a minimum of 6 -10 individuals per programme; a spread across time; and a 18

range of different stakeholders to include: DFID SROs (design & implementation); implementation partners (design & implementation); partners/ co-funders; government partners; and others.

(v)

Our approach was to start with an initial list based on these criteria. In some cases key stakeholders were not available to speak with us and we had to choose others. And as we talked with people they sometimes mentioned other people whom they considered central to the story and who might provide an interesting perspective. Given the investigative, uncovering nature of this work it was sometimes hard not to follow these leads. And when we did, sometimes a new aspect of the story would open up, enabling us to colour in a new area of activity that hitherto had been a byline in someone else’s story. Equally, we continually had to refer back to the position that these were not, and never could be, true and exhaustive stories of the programmes involved. There would in every case be key missing perspectives. The numbers of actors we engaged for each story and their stakeholder groups are shown below: Programme name

Total number

DFID

Other donors

Programme

of actors

management

engaged

support

Forestry management (Ghana)

6

1

Productive Safety Net Programme (Ethiopia)

6

3

3

Managing climate risks for the urban poor (South & South East Asia)

4

1

3

Developing resilience to climate change in the Caribbean

10

1

1

Nepal Climate Change Support Programme

13

GET FiT (Uganda)

8

Climate Resilient Green Economy (Ethiopia)

17

7

64

32

Government

2

4

Private sector

1

1

5

1

2

3

1

3

1

2

12

1

5

Helping countries transition to lower carbon development pathways

(iii)

Building resilience to manage climate, environment and other risks

(iv)

Improving stewardship of natural resources and the environment

 How were the programmes designed?

 What evidence do we find of programmes working or not working?



How is this framed?



How do they support low carbon development, resilient development and/or sustainable NR management?

 What examples do we find of (parts of) programmes that speak into the ICF’s transformational KPI/ Theory of Change



How do they support transformational and inclusive growth?

 What were the main areas of focus for sustainable development programming (e.g. funding mechanisms, capacity building (and for what?), governance and coordination, risk management)? x



How do they support and sustain poverty reduction?



What was the relative mix of short, medium and long-term planning horizons involved?

 How did the process play out over time (dynamics)?

 What was the overall learning about trade-offs?

 Who were the main stakeholders? Whose voices counted? Whose voices were marginalised or excluded? Why?  What enabled effective sustainable development programming?  What were the barriers and how did you address these?

 What did you learn? Methods for gathering and eliciting experiences, framings, reflections and insights We used two main approaches in gathering and eliciting participants’ experiences and reflections. For six of the seven stories we used 1:1 or small group interviews only. These interviews are perhaps better described as ‘appreciative conversations’, as we were keen to develop an appreciative, dialogic and conversational style rather than taking a more formal interviewing approach. These conversations were guided not only by our sub-questions but also by following where the participants chose to lead us. For the Nepal story we also ran a workshop for a group of 12 or so. For many of our stories we started with 2 - 3 conversations (usually with the DFID SRO and one or more implementation partners) and used these (a) to undertake an initial mapping of the timeline and storyline of the programme, and (b) as an initial gathering of experiences and reflections. We then sifted through the transcripts of these conversations for emerging themes but also for gaps and questions that had not been addressed. These then formed the basis for a second round of conversations. 19


Impact questions

What does each programme work on? What do they do?

offs involved?

Our starting point was the framing of sustainable development as set out in the DFID paper, ‘Securing and sustaining development, published in June 2015. This framing focuses on five principles for sustainable economic development: (ii)

Process questions



 What were the synergies and trade-

12

The purpose of the stories was to stimulate reflection, learning and discussion about ‘doing sustainable development in practice’. Our aim was to craft stories which could illuminate different aspects of and perspectives on ‘doing sustainable development’. Choosing a set of questions with which to structure conversations with practitioners, and to help us both in generating and in shaping material for these stories, was therefore a key design issue for us.

Supporting transformative and inclusive growth for poverty reduction

We then used this primary question to generate a set of sub-questions, which would form the basis of our story development process, including structuring our conversations with practitioners. These subquestions were also shaped by our reading of two papers by DFID’s Chief Economist, Stephen Dercon. These papers highlighted that sustainable development is a highly sophisticated and multifaceted narrative, in which the inter-relationships (and in particular the nature and timing of the trade-offs) between the main elements are key, and where the devil is often in the detail of implementation.

5

Developing a set of questions around which to generate and shape the stories

(i)

How can DFID and DECC promote and sustain transformational and inclusive growth in developing countries through programming that supports low carbon, resilient development pathways and sustainable natural resource management?

Content questions

1

4

From this policy narrative we derived the following learning question, around which our stories would be developed:

The sub-questions which we developed are set out below. We clustered these into three types: content questions, process questions, and impact questions:

1

5 4

NGOs

actors

Modernising the institutional architecture

20

For the four ‘lighter touch’ stories our 1:1 conversations were conducted by phone or by skype. For the three more in-depth stories these conversations were conducted face-to-face. This enabled the team involved to spend up to five days immersed in the country context and environment to elicit stories. Whereas most remote interviews were done on a one-to-one basis, the site visits allowed us to conduct a variety of approaches including one-to-one interviews, small stakeholder group interviews and larger group workshops. Being on site helped us quickly build on the momentum of early conversations and take this into later one. Writing and crafting the stories All our conversations were transcribed and we then distilled this material to pick out key quotes, themes that seemed to emerging, contradictions and so on. For each story we worked in pairs or trios to make sense and choices together. The tone of this work was not to uncover successes and failures – rather it was to reveal the complexity that lies behind perceptions of challenge, success and failure and show how that melds with personal and organisational goals, skills and actions. When it came to writing there were difficult choices to face. How to do justice to the material that had been offered? There was a wealth of things to notice and comment on. Where to shine the light? What results is without doubt highly dependent on the subjective judgements of the ‘historian’ teams as to what is interesting. To guide these judgements we continually referred back to our aim, which is to stimulate discussion, to appreciate multiple viewpoints, and to stimulate learning. Box 1. Harvesting or crafting? The ToR referred to ‘harvesting’ stories and we used this shorthand a great deal throughout the SDLD. We found this a valuable metaphor to guide the story development from the outset, beginning with gathering and eliciting practitioners’ experiences, framings, reflections and insights. The etymology of ‘harvest’ comes from the natural world - crops and fruit are picked when they are ripe and have something of value and sustenance to provide as part of the ongoing cycling of life. This metaphor also links with the concept of living systems and connotations of permaculture. We liked the way that the metaphor of harvesting values & respects the experience of those who are treading new paths & finding solutions to complex, adaptive programmes - valuing their experiences on the ground as much as the top down, evidence based ‘expertise’ approach. Yet every metaphor reveals some things and conceals others. Perhaps what doesn’t come through so well in this metaphor is the profoundly social process in which as researchers we were engaged in appreciative dialogue with practice holders (a) to help them construct a narrative of their own experience, from which we might then begin to shape themes and stories illustrated by their quotes; and (b) to then weave together several narratives in shaping the overall story. This points to the metaphors of ‘eliciting’, ‘gathering’, ‘crafting’ and ‘weaving’. The point is that the story doesn’t exist before the social, dialogical and creative process of storying. In this sense we are not taking what is already filled with life but rather, growing something. Development of the narrative form The story teams met on several occasions to share the sense they were making of their stories and to compare emerging themes, insights, voices, patterns, synergies & tensions. Initially we started with a 2page short story format but quickly abandoned this for a 6-8 page story format. We were keen to offer a consistent narrative form across all seven stories and experimented with a variety of ‘wire frames’ before agreeing on the narrative form presented in chapter 4. During this process we also validated quotes with story participants and tested the emerging narrative form with the insider team at DFID.

21


Reflections on phase 2 All those with whom we have shared the stories so far agree that they offer valuable insights into the process of shaping sustainable development programmes. From this limited feedback it appears that, guided by our creative principles and informing methodologies, we were effective in writing and crafting the stories, and that the narrative form that we created worked well. I like the quality of the stories, they’re really unusual. You rarely see stories like that in our world; you see case studies, which really focus on the ‘what’, and rarely focus on the human stories, the voices or that kind of tacit knowledge that you were trying to bring out, that experience. They’re very rare, they’re very readable, and the short little introduction at the front is well written, and it kind of draws you in. Jane Clark However, we need much more feedback before being in a position to offer any more insightful reflections. For example, without this feedback we are not yet ready to reflect on the choice of the questions we developed, around which to generate and shape the stories, or indeed on our choices of who to speak with in developing the stories. Developing the questions was a challenge for us. Sustainable development is one of the most complex topics that we could have chosen for piloting this approach. So we had to work quite hard to think about questions of content, process and perceived impact, and try to make sure that we covered questions on all of these. At the same time the stories do I think offer enormous insight into the possibilities of effective programming and implementation around a narrative which is not only complex, but also central to the future prosperity and wellbeing of our planet and her people. And for that you have to grasp the moment! John Colvin Personally I felt that the set of questions we developed was too complicated and the underlying rationale for all of the questions was quite fuzzy – there were many different threads and narrative options for DFID to unpack its sustainable development narrative. But I think we did a good job at finding a balance between questions on content, process and perceived outcomes, and that this comes across both in the stories and in the synthesis review. Russell Cook We probably should have tightened the overall question. It started out as a green growth dialogue. And then it changed into the sustainable development dialogue, and I thought, ‘Wait a minute, we’re going too wide’. But then I felt I’d missed the moment. On reflection I see you have to have patience to work on the questions, ensuring they will bring value later on: slow down to speed up. Jane Clark Views within the team also differed when it came to selecting the ICF programmes as a basis for story crafting. Some felt that we could have been more rigorous in our selection – for example selecting equal numbers of resilience, low carbon and NRM stories, or perhaps focusing on a particular region. Others felt that the selection was realistic given the range of political interests in play at the time, the time pressures we were under, and the need to go with programmes where people had the energy to engage.

22

understanding and its application in sustainable development policy making, programming and practice. As well as placing the stories and themes on the project website, and actively mailing these to key project stakeholders, we planned originally to hold a series of webinars and a final workshop. In practice we held two informal workshops (‘lunch and learns’), primarily to test the ten themes, followed by a final project workshop.

The quality of the stories is undeniable. We have been able to engage a really broad range of stakeholders in contributing to these stories, drawing from disparate countries and regions. But I do wonder about the programmes we chose for these stories – I think comparisons would have been more meaningful if you had chosen, say, two focusing on resilience, two on low carbon development and two on natural resource management. I wonder how the team made those choices, and whether these were strategic or simply based on who was willing to participate. James Alawi

There were two different approaches to the Lunch & Learns. The first was a one hour session, aimed at the Resilience Community of Practice within DFID and using the themes as an entry point to compare and contrast two of the resilience stories. The second was an Energy Lunch & Learn – the fourth in a series of learning workshops for the energy cadre – and focused on GET FiT. This workshop in particular convened an excellent conversation, although the main focus was on how to make renewable energy projects work and there was less reflection on the learning coming out of the GET FiT programme:

In the end, we didn’t have as broad a spread of programmes as we’d initially planned. Is that a problem? We ended up with seven diverse and interesting stories from DFID’s experience on the ground. We could have made different choices – for example focusing on resilience, where we had five stories – but then we would’ve missed the rich learning from GET FiT and FGMC. In different contexts, the programme selection might be more critical, but in this instance, I think going with the energy worked well for us. Rachel Phillips

During the second lunch and learn there was real interest in the room – indeed it was soon standing room only. And the discussions were very interesting – initially we had intended to discuss the themes emerging from the programme. However, so many people had been involved in GET FiT, from the design phase to implementation and were keen to get into the detail of the programme itself.” James Alawi

Tools and methods used during phase 3: Sense-making and synthesis As well as crafting seven stories of sustainable development in practice, it was agreed that we would produce an additional learning output – a review of the themes which are shared across the seven stories (see chapter 3). Here our approach was to sift for broader patterns, similarities and differences across the stories that might offer further insights and sources of learning. We undertook this work in two steps. First we convened two insider/outsider team workshops to scan the stories and from this we agreed an initial set of themes, each with a supporting narrative. This was followed by a more detailed analysis of the seven stories to check the robustness of the ten themes and to highlight further insights & learning, principles, dimensions & complexities of sustainable development practice and key questions that emerge across the seven stories. The resulting themes point to common challenges and dilemmas, but also to emerging areas of practice and approach, and particularly to ways in which DFID staff and others are approaching some of the challenges and opportunities of sustainable development. While we have insufficient feedback as yet to evaluate these themes and their resonance, we as the insider/outsider team found this work useful: I like the logical flow of the synthesis report. You can dip into it to read the themes or you can read it in its entirety. I like the way it makes me think about some of the common themes coming out of the different stories, and what value these might hold for my everyday practice. James Alawi

The purpose of the Lunch & Learn sessions was to link up with existing networks and people who have an interest in the work, will champion it and share it with others. We joined up with a community who were really interested in knowing about the ‘Get Fit’ programme, and it was part of a wider community of practice. So we were feeding their learning loop, so that’s why we got such a buzz out of that session. A lesson for me is that if you can tap into an existing group that has got energy in it, you’re going to go further than if you just bring a group of people into the room. Jane Clark

7. Overall reflections arising from the sustainable development learning dialogue

Given the increased time pressure at the end of the project, I think we did really well here. Yes, the result is not perfect or academic or long, but it’s great as a learning tool, and that’s what we’re aiming for. Wiebke Herding Tools and methods used during phase 4: ‘Engagement’ (diffusing and sharing) Our aim of this final phase was to engage different groups in dialogues and generative reflection around the stories and themes as means to trigger insights into practical know-how, and to strengthen

23


There were a lot of people who attended and keen to engage with the programme story and asked a lot of good questions about the programme. At the end this led to discussions that people arranged to follow up with afterwards, sparked by our GET FiT story, but about their own work. That showed us, I think, that these stories can be really good stimulants for conversations: people bring into their own inquiries and make connections - which was our intention; to create a ‘ripple effect’ of dialogues. Russell Cook

As a learning process the SDLD has been enormously rich, offering many potential areas of insight. Here we focus on four themes: trialling a participatory approach to learning about sustainable development in practice; reflections on the quality and rigour of our work; reflections on the value added of our approach; and reflections on the relationship between our learning approach and the kinds of learning offered through evaluation practices. Some of these reflections can also be found at the end of chapter 5. 24

Trialling a participatory approach to learning about sustainable development in practice

a good idea that we had last August. And, and it’s got a future, as well, as we design more programmes and as we have this kind of aspiration to learn across the portfolio. Jane Clark

As shown in Figure 1, DFID has been involved in a significant journey of learning about climate smart and sustainable development for over 5 years. The current ICF investment portfolio represents a major opportunity for learning as well as action on the ground. This led us early on in the SDLD to agree that as well as crafting and sharing learning stories, and building a process of dialogue around these, we would at the same time and in a conscious and reflexive manner be ‘trialling’ or ‘piloting’ a participatory approach to learning about implementation of sustainable development, and to testing a range of methodologies and methods underpinning this.xi So what is our emerging learning in this area?

On the one hand, then, it is simply too early in an emerging process to be able to judge the potential of the stories to stimulate learning. On the other hand, there is a sense that this approach to learning might be starting to take off and to ‘travel’ across DFID. I think there is real potential for the learning stories, and the themes, to stimulate learning among DFID Technical Specialists as well as SDLD practice holders and senior ICF policy managers. And yet we’re still quite early in a phase of experimenting with how best to use the stories and themes to engage people’s learning. So I’m really curious to see what will happen next. Because we ran out of time, the experiment may or may not proceed, but I’ve a good sense that it’s going to ripple outwards and find its feet. John Colvin

Opening up spaces for reflective learning among practitioners In terms of methodology, both learning history and critical appreciative inquiry appear to offer significant value as underpinnings to learning stories that in turn can stimulate insights among practitioners and possibly also among policy makers. Careful and creative design adds further value. The evidence for this is based not only on the appreciation by our immediate client within DFID of the stories and the insights these can offer, but also on feedback offered to Jane Clark and some other members of the team:

Slowing down to speed up

Some of our DFID contacts commented that new and different things have come out of seeing the quotes and perspectives from the different stakeholders, even though they speak with each other all the time. Rachel Phillips

As with many participatory processes, the programme required more time than originally anticipated. The ambitious timeline to complete the Sustainable Development Learning Dialogue within six months proved to be unrealistic and kept shifting backwards from inception and throughout implementation. On reflection this goes back to the experimental nature of the SDLD and testing a new approach to working with emergent learning. At the same time this was also influenced by the time it took to reach project and implementing partners for interviews and validate quotes and story narratives.

A number of people have already given me feedback on the stories and on the whole, at the moment, the feedback is positive. I was a bit nervous that people would say, ‘I don’t understand this; it’s just a load of quotes.’ But that hasn’t come back. In fact, there is a bit of a buzz around this work already, which is great, and that’s what we wanted.” Jane Clark

Sometimes it’s easy to think this kind of work can be done quickly - ‘oh it’s just a couple of interviews - that won’t take long’. But in retrospect, we underestimated the complexity of the approach we were taking and just how much time it takes to engage and follow up with multiple stakeholders and to craft stories to strike a balance between the richness of our conversations and a level of brevity and accessibility for our target audiences who weren’t there with us in those conversations. Rachel Phillips

The look and the feel of the stories draws people in – it’s not just the what you are telling people, but it’s also the how you are telling them that makes them want to dive in. We’ve had some good feedback that people found the stories easy to digest, having a format that is different from your usual report. Juliane Nier

The validation and the ethics that we brought to this are really important and have made our stories more robust. The challenge of trying to get the attention of very busy people was not easy - and also trying to ensure a variety of voices across the entire lifetime of programme lifespans - but was worth it in the end. Russell Cook

I think there's really good evidence here to say that, yes, telling more systemic stories, which I guess is about what Learning Histories try to do with bringing in multiple voices, is really valuable. And there's something here for me that speaks into telling concise, but rich, stories of experience which is difficult to measure. They're lived experiences, and that's not necessarily explicitly made visible in dayto-day organisational life. Russell Cook

Towards the end of the inception workshop I had a moment of panic. Having just completed the Climate Resilient Green Economy learning history for GGGI Ethiopia, I knew that our expectations in terms of workload and timescales were unrealistic. Added to which, we were proposing to craft stories around a particularly complex issue – sustainable development. Several times early in the project I urged that we work on fewer stories and spend more time using these to experiment with nurturing and growing dialogues. With fewer stories we also might have been better at communicating “little and often”. John Colvin

In fact some people are already asking me to come and help them do the same for them, people who are designing big, new programmes who are saying: ‘Can you come and work with us, to help us think how we can do the same? How do we do it? Who do we talk to? Who do we work with? How can we do this?’ I think it’s because it’s fresh and it’s new, I think because it’s grounded; it’s not just one piece of work, actually this has been going on over five years, you know, the kind of work that you helped us with a few years ago. So it’s not just 25


26

It is incredible what we have done to get those 7 stories – but the project really needed more time to build the dialogues after the story-crafting stage. In retrospect, attempting to shoehorn the SDLD into 6 months feels farcical. James Alawi

positive. Some people got really excited about this work and it helped us establish good relationships to build from. Russell Cook

Under-estimating the time it would take to complete seven stories as well as reflect and write about the overall process meant, that our original intention to ‘communicate little and often’ didn’t happen - partly because we ended up waiting until we had all the stories signed off and validated AND the emerging themes done – partly because the already formed communities of audiences & routes to them we had anticipated weren’t as structured or formed as we thought, amongst other things. In some ways, then, we have yet to more fully trial the participatory and dialogical elements of the SDLD which, clearly, were integral to the original design. At the same time, we have sparked considerable interest in our approach, with the lunch and learns attracting engaged audiences, and feedback from those who have read the stories has been positive.

The two principles which proved more challenging for us were principles 5 & 9. We have already noted above how our over-ambitiousness forced us all to slow down, but also meant that we were unable (for reasons of time and resources) to grow a proper dialogue process around our stories (principle #5: slow down to speed up). Time will tell whether this has been healthy or an opportunity lost. But it has certainly proved to be an important area of learning for us and so points to the value of this principle. Connected with this is principle #9: fail fast to succeed sooner. It is perhaps too early to say whether we took any notice of failures - were the timescales just too short to have been able to do this? Moreover whose judgements of ‘successes’ and ‘failures’ should count? Is this current phase of meta-reflection the time to look at failures as well as successes? In this respect, what insights will DFID have that might help it, in the next phase, to ‘drop failures’ and ‘build on successes’?

Trialling the principles from ‘Learning to Change’

Appreciating emergence through co-creative working and adaptive management

One of the things that we set out to trial was the principles from the ‘Learning to Change’ work. Alongside our methodologies, were these useful principles to be able to refer to? Certainly, principles 1 – 4 and 8 proved integral to our design – SDLD was designed with learning at the centre of a strategic path to impact (principle #1); it was based around a set of learning questions derived from current thinking about sustainable development in DFID (principle #2); the focus was on learning priorities (principle #3); and the learning was solidly grounded in the action of the seven programmes selected for story crafting (principle #4). In addition, SDLD was carefully positioned contextually, and adapted continuously as the context changed and developed (principle #8).

Another approach that we set out to trial was working in co-creative ways, with a focus on emergent practice. In retrospect, the insider/outside team reflected that it had taken a very collaborative and cocreative approach to the SDLD. The project started at a time when there was a focus on adaptive management within DFID, providing an opportunity to work in an iterative way with the DFID team. During the inception phase the team agreed a detailed work-plan outlining activities, milestones and outputs. These were revisited regularly throughout the project implementation and tested against the changing context to see if they were still fit for purpose.

I think we’ve done well at testing out our ten learning principles and I think we’ve strengthened them. If we were dipping back into those I would change some of the language, but I would keep the essence of them. I think ‘building learning into business as usual’ is now something that we have to do from this project, rather than what we achieved within the project. We considered the context really well. ‘Grounding learning into action’ will probably come from it. Jane Clark One of the principles that proved particularly generative was principle #10 – Grow connections, not collections. An emphasis on building relationships, networks and connections enabled the team to identify programmes to work with, engage the diverse range of stakeholders for each and seed the stories into DFID both informally and in the Lunch & Learns.

It was really important with this piece of work that we were adaptive and able to respond to ongoing changes in the DFID context and to what was emerging as the programme progressed. At times, this meant changing our approach from what we had originally planned or re-working something several times or recognising that we needed to slow down in places, which messed up our timeline! Holding the team together as we went through this emergent, shifting plan was not always easy. Rachel Phillips

The team were really good at building those relationships with the projects that we were putting them in touch with. They were very flexible to fit in with the project teams and that was all really important. Jane Clark

Learning from three different approaches to story crafting One aspect of the story crafting which is of particular interest is that we experimented with three different approaches, developing four of the stories using a lighter touch, remote conversational approach, and three of the stories through more in-depth site visits. And for one of the latter cases (CRGE in Ethiopia), rather than developing a story from scratch, we adapted a particularly in-depth learning history which

We spent a lot of time building quality relationships. Our scoping calls with the programmes, where we introduced the Dialogue and asked them about how this could be interesting to them, were very 27


I am often struck by the consultant team’s ability to take stock, reflect and re-prioritise on what’s best for the next stage. So when we were thinking about crafting the stories, ‘Okay, so what is it we want... Coming back to our stakeholders, how we’re reaching them, what’s the best way to draft these stories?’ When we’re thinking about engaging people, coming back again to what’s the most effective way of doing it? When we decided the webinar wasn't the best way to engage people, we decided on Lunch & Learns. I guess it’s the principle ‘slow down to speed up’. It is that. It’s very difficult when you’re under a lot of time pressure and when you’ve got a lot of challenges all pilling up. That’s something that the team does really well. Most people rush and get things out of the door, but taking that time to take stock and reflect is good. James Alawi

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had already been written for another client, re-storying the original 120-page version into the new, 7page SDLD format. For some of the remote programmes, for example in the Managing climate risks for the urban poor programme in South and South East Asia, we found it more difficult to engage a good cross-section of practitioners compared with the on-site programmes. Yet, even where the numbers were quite low (as in this, the PSNP and Forest Governance programmes), many of those that we did speak to were very enthusiastic and the quality of the material we gathered was as a consequence high. For example, while we only spoke with 6 practitioners about the PSNP programme, they appeared to enjoy these conversations and the opportunities these provided for reflection and articulation of experiences and insights. We found that the site-visits provided a more efficient setting for engaging practitioners quickly and over a short period of time. Additional value was provided by the opportunity to bring practitioners together in a shared learning experience: Arriving in Uganda, everybody was really keen to share their experiences with the GETFiT programme and were happy to talk about it. It made it really easy to get people to tell the story. By the end of the site visit, there’s a lot of momentum created in a short few days, with a wide range of people. Just by being there: in the culture and in people's’ offices feels more connected, like you’re with them and experiencing their story. On reflection this massively helped us to rapidly make sense of the multiple perspectives and learn from the ‘whole’ programme and create more meaningful narratives and insights. Russell Cook

Reflections on choice, quality and rigour in our approach Given the novelty to DFID of the organisational learning approach we have been trialling, interest has been generated in probing for the quality and rigour of our approach. As we set out in an earlier section of this annex, we have drawn on criteria from qualitative research, action research and systemic inquiry as a means both of reflecting ourselves on questions of choice, quality and rigour, and of offering others the opportunity to make their own informed judgements about the value of our approach. We briefly set out some of our reflections below. In terms of ‘rich rigour’, our challenge from the outset was to balance rigour against inclusiveness and feasibility. As a light touch learning intervention in a highly complex fund, we worked hard to develop sufficient richness and ‘requisite variety’ in our methodologies, samples, contexts, data sources and analytical approaches. Noting also Robert Chambers’ canon of ‘optimal ignorance and appropriate imprecision’, we believe we found a reasonable balance. This may indeed have shaped our choice, within the limitations of budget, to invest strongly in rigorous story crafting to the exclusion of the wider process of dialogue development, and only time will tell whether this was a wise decision. In terms of ‘sincerity’ and ‘credibility’, we believe that is for others to judge. We have sought to be open, through inclusion of extensive material in chapter 5 and this annex, about our “biases, goals, and foibles as well as about how these played a role in the methods, joys, and mistakes of the work”. We have also sought to share some of the challenges we encountered in designing and adapting this intervention in real time, and how as a result its foci transformed over time. We trust that the multivocality of our stories as well as within other chapters of this report, and the thick description of our narrative style, will serve to build credibility.

In Nepal we ran a multi-stakeholder workshop with a mix of people: we had the Nepali government, UNDP, the EU and DFID in the room reflecting on the NCCSP story together. A couple of people mentioned how useful it was to be in the room doing this together because that didn’t happen very often. And during the breaks there were lots of lively conversations as people were grabbing the opportunity to catch up. Rachel Phillips It should be noted that most learning history work focuses initially on those with whom the stories are created, and only subsequently works with the stories within a broader learning environment. It was therefore unusual – and surely a significant missed opportunity - that in the SDLD design we chose not to use the learning stories as a mechanism for progressing learning within the original programmes.

One of the quality criteria which particularly interests us is that of ‘resonance’ – the ability of our stories to meaningfully reverberate and affect our chosen stakeholders through reading and discussion. While initial feedback is promising in this respect, we eagerly await much more extensive feedback relevant to this criterion.

We didn’t really create a good feedback loop with the practice holders, but the stories seem to have been useful for them nonetheless. Wiebke Herding Originally, the idea of adapting the CRGE story was to provide a quick win for the insider/outsider team, something we could all learn from. There was an intention too that adapting a pre-existing story could save resources. In fact, the original story took a great deal of time and effort to adapt: Enabling the CRGE story to travel across a number of organisational, political and cultural boundaries proved challenging. The original story for GGGI Ethiopia remains confidential to that organisation, as its primary purpose was to support learning within GGGI and not to stimulate learning in others. But we were able to rework this story, initially for DFID Ethiopia, changing the main areas of focus and cutting out the 29


more sensitive sections. Essentially we then did something similar, again reworking the story for DFID UK, but then it was decided that all stories were to be put in the public realm, so we had to undertake a further round of validation and careful editing. This whole process itself took 6 months, and highlights the importance of treading delicate tightropes between local political cultures and the aspirational openness of learning processes. This has been a significant area of learning for us. John Colvin

The other aspect of quality and rigour which is of particular interest to us, but also at this early stage very difficult to assess, is linked to the question of how to design for a process which can stimulate learning across a highly complex and large scale system – the ICF portfolio. As DFID put to us at the outset: “we know how we can support learning within teams and projects – but how do we lift this learning to shape the wider fund or portfolio?” While there is currently enormous interest in this kind of transformational question, supported by an extensive academic literature on transitional and transformational change, the relevant question here is how we might assess the quality and rigour of our approach in this respect. Our view at this point is that the quality criteria from systemic inquiry traditions, as highlighted earlier, provide a useful guide:  To what extent and in what ways is this work exploring and mobilise inter-relationships?  To what extent and in what ways is this work engaging multiple voices?  To what extent and in what ways is this work attending to and critiquing boundary judgements?  To what extent and in what ways is this work engaging critical reflexivity?

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

Reflections on the relationship between our learning approach and the kinds of learning offered through evaluation practices

To what extent and in what ways is this work engaging critically with issues of power and political economy?

We believe we have made a good start through the SDLD in mobilising inter-relationships (‘collections not connections’) and engaging multiple voices, particularly through our stories. Drawing on systemic inquiry methodologies has helped us in this respect. The work has also constantly challenged team members both separately and together to engage in critical reflexivity. But it is the challenge of attending to and critiquing boundary judgements that particularly interests us – how and where do we draw effective boundaries at this early stage even as we seek to stimulate large scale and potentially transformational learning, and how do we help to support learning as it travels across organisational, political and cultural boundaries, with all the issues of power and political economy that are attendant on this? We don’t have any ready answers at this stage, but our work over the past 9 months has highlighted the importance of these boundary issues for us in multiple ways. Reflections on value for money In response to the DFID tender document for the SDLD we assembled a multidisciplinary team of six experienced learning and communications practitioners. In the beginning of the project, particularly when the whole team attended the first inception workshop, the size of the team could feel a bit big and unwieldy. However, throughout the implementation of the different project phases, the strength of a multidisciplinary team became obvious. It could offer a more versatile delivery by drawing on team members’ expertise during the activities of story crafting, communications and design, mapping and engagement of stakeholders or pressure testing from a sustainable development content angle. What’s been most effective is the element of co-creation, and the diverse team that we’ve had on the case. I’ve always felt a bit nervous that this piece of work could seem quite ‘fat’, but all the disciplines that people were bringing into the team (academic, leadership, learning, design and communications, organisational context and insight and programme management) was key to the quality of this work. Jane Clark

Here we turn to some reflections on the relationship between our learning approach and the kinds of learning offered through evaluation practices. This builds on questions that were raised during the ‘Learning for Change’ work which preceded this (Figure 3), and was further prompted by our conversations with members of the DFID and DECC evaluation and research communities during the SDLD. One of the things which became clear to us early on in these conversations is that it is useful to make a distinction between two types of discussion. The first is about the value of bridging between different traditions of learning, including between learning practices that are integral to M&E traditions, learning practices that are found in traditions outside M&E (figure 2), and yet other explorations of learning that have developed specifically in the context of climate change adaptation and resilience praxis. The second discussion is less around the relationship between M&E and other traditions of learning, and more to do with how we might best learn and/or evaluate under conditions that increasingly characterise many if not most sustainable development situations, which can be described as ‘wicked’ or ‘complex’ in the sense that they are underpinned by non-linear dynamics, multiple uncertainties, interdependencies, and/or where conflicts are inherent. Bringing the two discussions together then gives rise to the question: what combinations of monitoring, evaluating and learning practices do we need in complex spaces, particularly those concerning sustainable development? As some of these issues have been covered extensively by the author in a recent publication, we focus here on insights specifically relevant to or arising from the SDLD. Figure 3. Mapping the overlaps and differences between monitoring & evaluation practices, and learning practices (from the Learning for Change booklet: Learning for a Low Carbon Climate Resilient Society)

While the full value of the project, in terms of impact, is yet to be revealed, one only has to look at the relatively low cost of each learning story – to realise significant potential value for money, particularly when compared to the cost of 7 equivalent summative impact or performance evaluations. Added to this, the team as a whole made a very significant investment in this work, well beyond the number of days contracted. I was contracted to work on this project for 18 days, but ended up putting in almost twice that number. For me this investment felt worthwhile, as well as appreciated. And I am very aware that in comparison, probably all my colleagues invested well over twice the number of days we had contracted. John Colvin I am very aware that everybody in the team has put in more energy and work than what we budgeted for. I’m very aware of that and very thankful for that, because we all see it as important, and it’s a pilot and we all think there is a win-win for us all somewhere in it. It’s not just another piece of work. It has been energising. Jane Clark

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We start with consideration of the second discussion as we have found this helpful for clarifying the first. How might we best learn and/or evaluate in complex situations? Seeing situations as complex is essentially a framing decision, but it gives rise to significant differences in the way we understand change, and therefore in how we design for and with change. The challenge of working with the complexity framing, as we did in the SDLD, lies in switching out of one set of design assumptions (for simple or complicated situations), already well established institutionally and culturally, and into another set (for complex situations), still relatively recent, particularly in organisational settings (Table 2). These in turn lead to very different requirements for learning and evaluation (Table 3). Table 2. Design approaches appropriate to different types of situationxii Framing Simple

Characteristics of the situation

Design and leadership approaches

Repeating patterns and consistent events Clear cause-and-effect relationships evident to everyone: right answer exists Known knowns Fact-based management

Sense, categorise, respond Ensure that proper processes are in place Delegate Use best practices Communicate in clear, direct ways Understand that extensive interactive communication may not be necessary

Complicated

Expert diagnosis required Case-and-effect relationships discoverable but not immediately apparent to everyone; more than one right answer possible Known unknowns Fact-based management

Sense, analyse, respond Create panels of experts Listen to conflicting advice Create good practice

Complex

Flux and unpredictability No right answers: emergent instructive patterns Many competing stakes and ideas A need for creative and innovative approaches Pattern-based leadership

Probe, sense, respond Create environments and experiments that allow patterns to emerge Increase levels of interaction and communication Use methods that can help generate ideas and innovative practices: - Open up discussions (as through large group methods) - Stimulate attractors - Encourage dissent and diversity - Manage start conditions - Monitor for emergence

SIMPLE

COMPLICATED

Single way to do it

Contingent

Dynamic and emergent – the future is increasingly unlike the past

Metaphor for direction

Written directions

Map and timetable

Compass

Monitoring approach

Let’s figure out observable and measurable indicators

Let’s figure out observable and measurable indicators

Indications are the way to go – observable but not measurable

Evaluation question

What works?

What works for whom in what contexts?

What’s working and why?

Knowledge practice supported

Knowledge transfer (‘best practice’)

Knowledge translation (‘good practice’)

Focus of learning

We document successes and discard failures with the intent to improve

We document successes and failures with the intent to learn and to replicate in similar contexts

Knowledge generation (‘emergent practice’) Successes are not easily replicable - most successes are the failures from which we learn


Single and double loop

Sense, categorise, respond - regular cycles of single loop learning

Sense, analyse, respond – longer phases of analysis and response lead to longer cycles of both single and double loop learning, often summative but also formative

Probe, sense, respond – rapid and continuous cycles of learning from the outset, with reflexive attention to both single, double and triple loop learning



 

There is no prolonged analysis phase in complex design approaches; rather, initial sense-making leads to early engagement of stakeholders who then undertake rapid collaborative analysis as a basis for immediate action and experimentation rather than long-term planning; The design approach can rapidly progress through widening circles of stakeholder engagement and co-production; even though ‘tipping points’ cannot be designed in in advance; Learning occurs continuously throughout the process, both in sense making as pattern-recognition and in learning through action. Evaluation tends to follow learning at the end of these short action cycles and leads directly to the shaping of new learning questions as the basis for further probing and sense-making. Theories of change are based on explicit early learning questions and loops followed by more open-ended subsequent learning loops set within more loosely defined pathways than in complicated situations. Design itself is likely to be emergent – focused on experimentation – rather than characterised by a carefully constructed blueprint. This can be particularly challenging for those seeking to transition from complicated to complex design praxis.

These features resonate well with our praxis story of the SDLD to date, as well as with our selection of methodologies and methods. For complex situations, accountability must also be framed differently, based on joint accountability to good learning practices and with outcomes and impacts set within learning frameworks that enable their reframing. It is therefore particularly important in such situations that the sponsor or funders of the initiative recognize and endorse the emergent nature of the situation they are working in. This has certainly been an enabling feature of the SDLD process.

COMPLEX

Nature of direction and theory of change

Single loop

Rhythm of learning

Tables 2 and 3 together with other work highlight several major differences between design approaches for complex as compared to complicated situations:



Table 3. Requirements for monitoring, evaluation and learning in different types of situationxiii Framing of situation

Loops of learning

Anticipatory learning from emergent futures Single, double and triple loop

How might we best bridge between different traditions of learning to support sustainable development in practice in complex situations? If we look at programme design through a complexity lens, then we find a great deal of promising work on emergent learning practices being developed within a broad spectrum of different traditions. There are several traditions within the evaluation community who are very active in this area, and working a number of different perspectives on complexity itself. The many traditions of learning which sit outside the evaluation space, including traditions of social learning and systemic inquiry described in section 3, have been working with complexity for over 20 years in some fields (for example natural resource management and water resources management) and are increasingly bridging into the evaluation space and vice versa. Those working on learning directly out of sustainable development, resilience and climate change adaptation traditions are also now entering this space, offering another valuable set of experiences and building new bridges also. 33

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By framing sustainable development situations as complex, we can then ask valuable questions about what combinations and sequences of monitoring, evaluating and learning practices are needed to help us navigate these spaces. While the SDLD started out specifically from a set of learning traditions drawn from outside the evaluation community, this is not to say that with time and depending on how and where it grows, it can’t link with traditions and new practices from within the evaluation space, thereby generating the new mixes and sequences of learning practices that will be required.

In Nepal I met a DFID manager who was doing an annual review, and when she heard about our approach and what we were trying to do she said to me, ‘this is great’. Now I have so much information about what makes these programmes really work, like the time we spend building quality relationships and trust. There’s just no clear box for it in the annual review that does it justice. So, there are lots of valuable things that we have in our programmes on the ground and in country offices that just don't get fully valued. Russell Cook

(a) First, how to build a dialogue around the stories? The Lunch and Learns were two early steps we felt we took with the time and budget of the SDLD, but the dialogue is only just beginning. How to take this forward? To provide support in this process, DFID might consider ways of more actively involving the ‘friends of the SDLD’ and other ‘trusted brokers’ in convening time-bounded learning dialogues around the stories. Or it might consider working with local in-country actors, such as consultants, universities or NGOs, to support such processes, thereby growing local capacity.

What we’ve got here through the learning dialogues is a practical example of learning: ‘This is how we’ve approached it. This is the way we’re taking it forward. Look at this as an approach.’ This isn’t an evaluation. This isn’t done in terms of accountability. It’s an appreciative inquiry looking at how a programme worked in practice. James Alawi

(b) Second, how to spread the value of learning histories and other related methodologies as a means of learning about emerging practices across a much wider set of projects and programmes in the ICF portfolio? There is already momentum here as indicated by the growing interest from some of these programme in the SDLD approach. DFID might also consider engaging ICF programmes already taking strong learning approaches – such as CDKN and BRACED – to further reflect on and promote the learning about the learning flowing from SDLD.

James Alawi

8. Recommendations and next steps With the portfolio of stories, the themes emerging from them and the first few conversations around these, the Sustainable Development Learning Dialogue has created a platform for DFID to expand learning about how it can implement sustainable development in practice. As noted above, there is already a palpable sense that this approach to learning is catching and will begin to spread with its own momentum. Starting to hear the reactions to the stories, and the approach we have taken both with DFID and the other programme stakeholders, I sense a lot of momentum building. The portfolio of stories are already acting like catalysts, showing alternative possibilities, triggering more dialogue, learning and hopefully action. Rachel Phillips Equally, there are a number of practical next steps that DFID could take to support this momentum. The Climate & Environment team, which has championed this process and is already looking at learning within DFID in the context of sustainable development, should carefully consider the learning and the emerging learning practices from the SDLD. The team might consider this as a ‘design moment’, drawing on the experiences, outputs and outcomes of the SDLD first to reflect and then to develop a systemic design for the next phase. Our recommendations below indicate some design possibilities. 35


Russell Cook

For me framing this as a dialogue was really important. But we are only just at the start of that dialogue – it is certainly too early to say whether we have been successful or not. All we have at the moment is a set of really interesting stories, and the start of some conversations. So it is important to consider how we move forward with this. For example, how can we use this to stimulate further dialogue through the MEL programme? James Alawi

Meanwhile, recognition of the value of different learning methodologies and practices from a variety of traditions has already been generated by these conversations within SDLD:

A quick learning dialogue on GET FiT will not deliver the same output as a full-on evaluation. So understanding where there’s complementarity could be a nice way of explaining it.

A question this process now raises for me: how does DFID take this approach and create more spaces that more easily bring about conversations, more often, about what people are experiencing on the ground?

The first thing we’ve got to do out of this project, rather than starting another big initiative, is to revisit our engagement plan and use it with more people, to get good learning going now in other programmes. And we need to consider how we use this as a multiplier, to help other people to do something differently. It’s the more subtle work, really the concept of mining this work - helping others to learn from and build on what we did.” Jane Clark (c) Third, alongside these practical next steps, we would strongly encourage DFID to consider the development of a systemic design framework (i.e. methodology) for the next phase of work. This could draw on the early design framework developed by John Colvin and Jane Clark in 2014, the outputs of DFID’s “Learning for a low carbon, climate resilient society”, and on emerging systemic design thinking within the SDLD. A specific suggestion is that this could draw on some combination of learning and evaluation practices suitable for complex situations, linked to a methodological framework (e.g. from the systemic inquiry literature) for upscaling learning across complex systems. For example, some combination of learning history, outcome harvesting and systemic action research methodologies might be worth considering here. Thinking through such a design could be undertaken quite quickly, for example through a 3 or 4-day design lab. (d) Finally, we recommend that the ICF MEL programme should review the work undertaken through the SDLD and carefully consider how to build on this. This could include both the crafting and use of stories as a basis for dialogue, and consideration of ‘learning about learning’ from SDLD – for 36

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There is a lot of discussion within ICF MEL currently about what ‘emergent learning’ looks like. One of the benefits of the SDLD is that it provides a very practical example of emergent learning. Maybe this programme, as a practical example of translating theory into practice – praxis – could help to offer some practical ways forwards? And it could help lift these discussions out of the general theory and into the wider context. James Alawi

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Cooperrider DL, Srivastva S (1987) Appreciative inquiry in organisational life. In Woodman R, Pasmore W (eds.) Research in organizational change and development Volume 1. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press; 129-169. Cooperrider DL, Whitney (2005) Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution in Change. San Francisco: BerrettKoehler. Grant S, Humphries M (2006) Critical evaluation of appreciative inquiry: Bridging an apparent paradox. Action Research 4(4), 401 – 418; Mukute M (2016) Dialectical critical realism and Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT): Exploring and expanding learning processes in sustainable agriculture workplace contexts. In Price L, Lotz-Sisitka H (eds) Critical Realism, Environmental Learning and Social-Ecological Change. London: Routledge, 190 – 211. Preskill H, Catsambas TT (2006) Reframing Evaluation through Appreciative Inquiry. California: Sage Publications. Ridley-Duff RJ, Duncan G (2015) What is critical appreciation? Insights from studying the critical turn in an appreciative inquiry. Human Relations 68(10), 1579 – 1599. Scharmer O, Kaufer K (2013) Leading from the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economics. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler. Snowden DJ (2003) Managing for serendipity...or why we should lay off 'best practice'. KM Magazine 6(8).

Design thinking Bason C (2014) Design for Policy. Farnham: Gower. Curedale RA (2013) Design thinking: Process and methods manual. Topanga: Design Community College Inc.

Criteria for assessing choice, quality and rigour in learning practice Chambers R (2015) Inclusive rigour for complexity. Journal of Development Effectiveness, 7(3) 327 – 335. Eyben R, Roche C, Guijt I, Shutt C (2015) The Politics of Results and Evidence in International Development. Rigby: Practical Action Publishing. Marshall J, Reason P (2007) Quality in research as “taking an attitude of inquiry”. Management Research News, 30(5) 368 – 380 Reason P (2006) Choice and quality in action research practice. Journal of Management Inquiry, 15(2) 187 – 203 Tracey SJ (2010) Qualitative Quality: Eight “Big-Tent” Criteria for Excellent Qualitative Research. Qualitative Inquiry, 16(10) 837-851. Van Hemelrijck A, Guijt I (2016) Balancing inclusiveness, rigour and feasibility: Insights from participatory impact evaluations in Ghana and Vietnam. Centre for Development Impact: Practice Paper 14, February 2016. Williams B (2015) Prosaic or Profound? The adoption of systems ideas by impact evaluation. IDS Bulletin, 46(1) 7 – 16.

Cornwall A (2014) Using participatory process evaluation to understand the dynamics of change in a nutrition education programme. IDS Working Paper 437. Sussex: Institute of Development Studies. Davies R (2016) Evaluating the impact of flexible development interventions using a ‘loose’ theory of change. Reflections on the Australia-Mekong NGO Engagement Platform. A Methods Lab publication. London: Overseas Development Institute. Hinkel A, Bisaro S, Downing T, Hofman M, Lonsdale K, McEvoy D, Tabara, D (2010) Learning to adapt: re-framing climate change adaptation. In Hulme M, Neufeldt H. (Eds.) (2010) Making climate change work for us: European perspectives on adaptation and mitigation strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jeans H, Colvin J (2013) Key concepts in climate change: Learning to adapt and transform. Godalming: WWF. Lead International (May 2015). Learning for a low carbon climate resilient society. Available for download from cdkn.org Lonsdale K, Pringle PW, Turner B (2015) Transformative adaptation: what it is, why it matters & what is needed. UK Climate Impacts Programme, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK O’Brien, K, Pelling, M, Patwardhan, A, Hallegatte, S, Maskrey, A, Oki, T, Oswald-Spring, U, Wilbanks, T and Yanda, PZ (2012) Toward a sustainable and resilient future. In: Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation [Field, CB, Barros, V, Stocker, TF, Qin, D, Dokken, DJ, Ebi, KL, Mastrandrea, MD, Mach, KJ, Plattner, G-K, Allen, SK, Tignor, M and Midgley, PM (eds.)]. A Special Report of Working Groups I and II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, and New York, NY, USA, pp. 437-486. Patton MQ (2011) Developmental Evaluation: Applying Complexity Concepts to Enhance Innovation and Use (1st ed.). London: The Guilford Press. Patton MQ, McKegg K, Wehipeihana N (Eds.) (2016) Developmental evaluation exemplars: Principles in practice. London: The Guilford Press. Rogers P, Guijt I, Williams B (2009) Thinking systemically: Seeing from simple to complex in impact evaluation. Expert lecture for AfREA Conference, Cairo, Egypt, March 2009. Snowden D, Boone M (2007) A leader's framework for decision making. Harvard Business Review: 69–76, November 2007 USAID (2013) Discussion Note: Complexity-Aware Monitoring. http://usaidlearninglab.org/sites/default/files/resource/files/Complexity%20Aware%20Monitoring%202013-1211%20FINAL.pdf Westley F, Zimmerman B, Patton MQ (2006) Getting to maybe: How the world is changed. Toronto: Random House Canada. Wilson-Grau R, Britt H.(2012) Outcome harvesting. Cairo, Egypt: The Ford Foundation’s Middle East and North Africa Office. Available at http://www.outcomemapping.ca/resource/resource.php?id=374.

DFID papers on sustainable development Dercon S (2014a) Should Aid make Growth green? London: DFID, June 2014. Dercon S (2014b) Inclusive and Transformational Growth. London: DFID, September 2014. DFID (2015) Securing and sustaining development. London: DFID, June 2015.

Learning and evaluation – further references Bajpai S (2013) Simple, complicated, complex and chaotic: Adaptation to Climate Change (M&E). Unpublished presentation. Pune: Watershed Organisation Trust, January 2013. Bamberger M, Vaessen J, Raimondo E (Eds.) (2016) Complexity in development evaluation: A practical approach. London: Sage. Bours D, McGinn C, Pringle P (2014) Monitoring & evaluation for climate change adaptation and resilience: A synthesis of tools, frameworks and approaches, 2nd edition. SEA Change CoP, Phnom Penh and UKCIP, Oxford. Burns D (2014) Assessing impact in dynamic and complex environments: Systemic action research and participatory systemic inquiry. CDI Practice Paper, No 8, Sept 2014. Colvin J (2015) Designing for learning and resilience as a basis for measuring, monitoring and evaluating climate change adaptation. In: Colvin J, Williams A, Ebi K, Patwardhan A (Eds.) Monitoring, evaluation and learning for climate change adaptation at the national level. Unpublished report. Washington: STAP/Provia, October 2015. Colvin J, Clark J (2014) Scoping an approach to learning across the International Climate Fund (ICF) and other DFID climate investments: An initial learning system design. London: DFID. 39


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Footnotes i ii iii

iv v

vi

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viii ix

x

xi

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xiii

DFID (2013) Future Fit: DFID Strategy 2013-2015. Presentation, DFID, May 2013. From the Terms of Reference, 11th May 2015 Praxis is the process by which a theory, lesson, or skill is enacted, embodied, or realised. It may also refer to the act of engaging, applying, exercising, realizing, or practicing ideas. All reflections are by the author unless otherwise indicated. This section draws on the introduction to the original CRGE learning history which was written and developed by Margaret Gearty and John Colvin for the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI), Ethiopia. https://ccafs.cgiar.org/publications/climate-change-and-social-learning-ccsl-supporting-local-decision-makingclimate-change In some project documents we used the term ‘audiences’ rather than ‘stakeholders’. In this annex I have used the term ‘stakeholders’ throughout, as ‘audiences’ carries with it implications of one-way communication, which was only one of our engagement styles. Chloe Dyson, John Colvin, Juliane Nier, Rachel Phillips, Russell Cook, Wiebke Herding. Andrews M (2013) Explaining positive deviance in public sectors reforms in development. WIDER Working Paper No. 2013/117. UNU-WIDER. This question was selected in part for its resonance with the four categories of ‘enabler’ proposed for the next phase of ICF: political will, capacity of partners, know-how and finance mechanisms. Strictly speaking, it is incorrect to speak of ‘trialling’ or ‘piloting’ in complex situations, since the learning can never be replicated. More appropriate metaphors are ‘wayfinding’ and ‘prototyping’, with the latter metaphor being used extensively within the Theory U tradition. Source: Snowden D, Boone M (2007) A Leader's Framework for Decision Making. Harvard Business Review: 69–76, November 2007 Source: Table based on: Bajpai S (2013) Simple, complicated, complex and chaotic: Adaptation to Climate Change (M&E). Unpublished presentation. Pune: Watershed Organisation Trust, January 2013; Rogers P, Guijt I, Williams B (2009) Thinking systemically: Seeing from simple to complex in impact evaluation. Expert lecture for AfREA Conference, Cairo, Egypt, March 2009; and Colvin J (2015) Designing for learning and resilience as a basis for measuring, monitoring and evaluating climate change adaptation. In: Colvin J, Williams A, Ebi K, Patwardhan A (Eds.) Monitoring, evaluation and learning for climate change adaptation at the national level. Unpublished report. Washington: STAP/Provia, October 2015.

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Appendix 2: Introduction to the Sustainable Development Learning Dialogue

The Sustainable Development Learning Dialogue A “learning dialogue” is a participatory process that will help us to harvest rich know-how from our programmes on the ground – and get practical insights into use across the organisation. This learning dialogue will explore: How can DFID implement sustainable development in practice? It will help us to explore and learn how we can ensure our poverty reduction work is resilient to climate change and how we will implement the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in practice.

How will it help you?

Decision makers and policy thinkers

Senior Responsible Officers for ICF programmes and climate and environment experts

DFID Advisers who want to learn more about how to integrate climate and environment into programmes

The learning dialogue will provide you with practical examples of how DFID is implementing ‘sustainable development’ on the ground. These can be used to help inform strategic decisions and strengthen how you talk about DFID’s impact on sustainable development.

The learning dialogue will provide you with in-depth insight into how other programmes are designing and implementing sustainable development in DFID focus countries. You will have the opportunity to take part in exciting discussions around the findings.

The learning dialogue will produce a series of accessible products to help you learn about how to design and implement new sustainable development programmes.

I want to find out how other programmes have tackled the challenges or ramped up action on the ground successfully, and if their experiences of integrating sustainable development are similar to mine. Simone Bannister, C&E Adviser DFID Caribbean

I would like to learn from others who work on ICF programmes in urban areas so I can build more of it into my sustainable cities for growth programming. Rubbina Karruna, Cities Adviser, Growth & Resilience Department

I want the learning dialogue to help DFID think through how we deliver the SDGs in practice. Andrea Ledward, Head of Climate & Environment Department

How will the Sustainable Development Learning Dialogue work? We will gather in-depth stories from seven ICF programmes, looking at what they do, how they were designed, and how they are implementing sustainable development on the ground.

We will invite you to take part in a series of conversations to discuss the emerging findings. This will help us to uncover the themes, trends and know-how that we can learn from.

The stories will help us understand the challenges that people face, what works well, and why.

The dialogue will feedback into the sense-making to build our understanding

Sharing

Sense-making Investigating

Local sustainable development practice on the ground

Collect insight from seven ICF programmes implementing sustainable development in practice. Uncover seven stories of sustainable development practice. With: ICF Senior Responsible Officers and programming teams

Develop our understanding by identifying the emerging themes between the different practices on the ground. Spot trends, similarities and differences to learn from. With: ICF Senior Responsible Officers and climate and environment experts

Engage different groups in the dialogue and the development of practical know-how. Use the dialogue to strengthen our understanding and increase the uptake and implementation of valuable sustainable development learning.

Improved organisational know-how for sustainable development programming, decision-making and policy making

With: ICF Senior Responsible Officers for ICF programme, climate and environment experts, decision makers and policy thinkers and DFID Advisers

Turning practice on the ground into organisational know-how For more information about the project, go to www.sddialogue.net. Get the dialogue started – sign up for updates and tell us your views.

Appendix 3: The learning questions

Sustainable Development Learning Dialogue

Learning Questions How can DFID and DECC promote and sustain transformational and inclusive growth in developing countries through programming that supports low carbon, resilient development pathways and sustainable natural resource management?

Content Questions

Process Questions

• What does each programme work on? What do they do? • How are they framed? • How do they support transformational & inclusive growth? • How do they support poverty reduction?

• How were the programmes designed? • How did the process play out over time? • Who were the key stakeholders? Dynamics? • What enabled effective SD in this context? • What were the barriers & how were they overcome? • How / why do they work or fail?


Perceived Outcome Questions

• Do programmes work? • What are the perceived outcomes to date / emerging impacts? • How do they deliver against Sustainable Development / transformational and inclusive growth / poverty reduction? • How long before they saw real impacts? • What were the synergies & trade offs involved?

Appendix 4: The overarching creative principles

The Sustainable Development Learning Dialogue

Overarching Principles Informed by earlier work in the Learning for Change Dialogues and the M&C Saatchi report “DFID Climate Change Learning”, we will apply the following principles throughout our engagement products: Connections, not collections. Instead of producing long reports that nobody reads, we will focus on learning outputs that encourage conversations within DFID. Key to this, will be creating content that resonates with our target audiences.

Stories as entry points to dialogue Informed by the comprehensive learning process, our learning outputs will use stories to illustrate broader patterns and themes, without losing the richness. This will help create interest; signpost multiple pathways that could be explored; and, initiate a dialogue that allows participants to share knowledge and build organisational know-how.

Allow for self-service learning and clear navigation A central collection point of all learning outputs will help individuals to find their way through the learning outputs, apply insights to their work and follow the progress of the project.

Prioritise accessibility Our learning products will use clear, action-orientated design and straightforward language that avoids jargon.

Communicate little and often In our communications, we will model a learning approach: We will not wait until we have all the answers, but we will regularly reach out with intermediate findings and emerging questions.

Creative Principles The design is clean, simple and engaging. There is a clear identifier that ties all of the communications together and a visual language that makes the entire project cohesive and differentiated. The look and feel will draws inspiration from creative applications that have a proven track-record in engaging people in sustainable development issues. The design will: Make the learning products easy to recognise and standout

Help the audience find the information that’s most relevant to them


Connect key concepts and messages together

Organise and link the patterns emerging from the learning using visual devices

Bring a human-feel to reflect all the different voices we’re learning from

Bring the stories and learning to life through stakeholder quotes draw from real conversation in a balanced way

Visualise models and concepts as much as possible (rather than writing explanations in long form)


Creative style guide

Graphic identifier

Supporting graphic devices

Colour palette

Font Arial Arial Bold Arial italic Arial Bold italic

The master identifier is the result of visualising ‘conversation’ and ‘dialogue’ with a seemingly random, organic form, although this is underpinned with a structure and based on a formula. Influenced by the Fibonacci sequence, often found in nature, the pattern strikes a balance, representing the core values of the programme – showing how conversation and dialogue will reveal patterns and insight that help navigate complexity. Fluid in nature, the ident used in conjuction with the supporting graphic elements and the devised colour palette creates a unique suite of graphics. Combining the key elements will enable enough flexibility and longevity to be used on all future comms across various media.

As a whole or cropped and shown in part to add intrigue at the start of a document.

Application

Gradient headline

Graphic elements used as colour coding to differentiate between the groups...

Graphic elements used to form a visual flow chart How will the Sustainable Development Learning Dialogue work?

A “learning dialogue” is a participatory process that will help us to harvest rich know-how from our programmes on the ground – and get practical insights into use across the organisation.

We will gather in-depth stories from seven ICF programmes, looking at what they do, how they were designed, and how they are implementing sustainable development on the ground.

It will help us to explore and learn how we can ensure our poverty reduction work is resilient to climate change and how we will implement the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in practice.


...also opening and closing marks to border the quotes.

Utilising a cross platform system font to ensure compatibility when sharing documents.


This learning dialogue will explore: How can DFID implement sustainable development in practice?

Ident cropped emphasises random nature and lack of structure

Elements utilised from the main ident used as speech bubbles and quotation marks. Also used singularly to represent cells, sectors and form supporting graphics.

A palette devised with blues: self sufficient, modern, aware, open and ambitious. And complimentary Orange: Warm, optimistic, social. and Reds: Active, exciting, confident. Gradient also devised, used for headlines and rules.

How will it help you?

Decision makers and policy thinkers

Senior Responsible Officers for ICF programmes and climate and environment experts

DFID Advisers who want to learn more about how to integrate climate and environment into programmes

The learning dialogue will provide you with practical examples of how DFID is implementing ‘sustainable development’ on the ground. These can be used to help inform strategic decisions and strengthen how you talk about DFID’s impact on sustainable development.

The learning dialogue will provide you with in-depth insight into how other programmes are designing and implementing sustainable development in DFID focus countries. You will have the opportunity to take part in exciting discussions around the findings.

The learning dialogue will produce a series of accessible products to help you learn about how to design and implement new sustainable development programmes.

I want to find out how other programmes have tackled the challenges or ramped up action on the ground successfully, and if their experiences of integrating sustainable development are similar to mine. Simone Bannister, C&E Adviser DFID Caribbean

I would like to learn from others who work on ICF programmes in urban areas so I can build more of it into my sustainable cities for growth programming. Rubbina Karruna, Cities Adviser, Growth & Resilience Department

I want the learning dialogue to help DFID think through how we deliver the SDGs in practice. Andrea Ledward, Head of Climate & Environment Department

We will invite you to take part in a series of conversations to discuss the emerging findings. This will help us to uncover the themes, trends and know-how that we can learn from.

The stories will help us understand the challenges that people face, what works well, and why.

Ident reveal to visualise order and structure.

The dialogue will feedback into the sense-making to build our understanding

Sharing

Sense-making Investigating

Local sustainable development practice on the ground

Collect insight from seven ICF programmes implementing sustainable development in practice. Uncover seven stories of sustainable development practice. With: ICF Senior Responsible Officers and programming teams

Develop our understanding by identifying the emerging themes between the different practices on the ground. Spot trends, similarities and differences to learn from. With: ICF Senior Responsible Officers and climate and environment experts

Engage different groups in the dialogue and the development of practical know-how. Use the dialogue to strengthen our understanding and increase the uptake and implementation of valuable sustainable development learning.

Improved organisational know-how for sustainable development programming, decision-making and policy making

With: ICF Senior Responsible Officers for ICF programme, climate and environment experts, decision makers and policy thinkers and DFID Advisers

Turning practice on the ground into organisational know-how For more information about the project, go to www.sddialogue.net. Get the dialogue started – sign up for updates and tell us your views.

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements This publication is based on many conversations and interviews with experts and practitioners, both within DFID and beyond. We’d like to thank the following individuals for taking the time to share their stories and help us think through the questions arising from the DFID Sustainable Development Learning Dialogue.

Programmes and projects

Other participants



Cristina Rumbaitis del Rio, formerly Rockefeller Foundation; Sam Kernaghan and Sasank Vemuri, consultants to the UCCRTF; and Shailaja Annamraju, DFID

Alhassan Attah, former Executive Director, Timber Industry Development Division, Ghana Forestry Commission; Samuel Nketiah, Tropenbos; Chris Beeko, Ghana Forestry Commission; Clare Brogan, FLEGT facilitator; Kofi Boakye, Domestic Lumber Association; and Julia Falconer, Dermot Shields and John Hudson, DFID

Fighting chronic food insecurity Kelly Johnson, Donor Coordination Team; Sarah Coll-Black and Wout Soer, World Bank; and Melkamnesh Alemu, Tim Conway and Ayuba Sani, DFID Engaging the private sector to invest in renewable energy Jan-Martin Witte, Stephanie Rieger and Kathrin Käestle, KfW; Isaac Kinhonhi and Ziria Tibalwa Waako, ERA; Rene Meyer, GET FiT Secretariat; Vincent Kasangaki, Investment Committee; Vy Manthripragada, KMR Infrastructure; and Howard Standen and Chris Bold, DFID Building climate resilience in the Caribbean Dr Ulric Trotz, Dr Kenrick Leslie and Dr Mark Bynoe, CCCCC; Owen Day and Newton Eristhee, Caribsave; Cheryl Dixon, Caribbean Development Bank; Heidi Clarke, Sandals Foundation; Bernadette Lendore-Sylvester, Government of Grenada; and Simone Banister, DFID

Transforming Ethiopia’s economy In helping us to shape this story, we would like to thank Emma Williams and Ciara Silke at DFID Ethiopia, and Ato Admasu on behalf of the Government of Ethiopia. We also thank Robert Mukiza and Daniel Yeo at GGGI Ethiopia for permission to adapt the original and much more extensive learning history commissioned by them. Building climate resilience through community-based adaptation Anil KC, Durga Uprety, Sita Shahi and Pragati Sharma, UNDP; Batu Uprety and Naresh Sharma, Central Government of Nepal; Simon Anderson, IIED; Deepak Rijal, independent consultant; and Annika Olsson, Clare Shakya, Sabita Thapa, Mark Smith and Simon Lucas, DFID


The following people contributed their thinking in workshops and interviews during the project: Dan Ayliffe, Carina Bachofen, Helen Bryer, John Carstensen, Rubbina Karruna, Sophie Lawson, Sarah Lester, Simon Lucas, Clare McCrum, Stephen Mooney, Robert Phillips, Claudia Piacenza, Alison Pollard, Alexis Raichoudhury, Julia Raybould, Robert Towers and everyone who attended the “lunch and learn” workshops in February 2016.

Project team James Alawi, Jane Clark, Annika Olsson, John Colvin, Russell Cook, Chloe Dyson, Wiebke Herding, Juliane Nier and Rachel Phillips. Special thanks to Darren McGrane for his creative input and design during this emergent process.

This material has been funded by UK aid from the UK government; however the views expressed do not necessarily reflect the UK government’s official policies.