Complex issues – like climate change, inequality or a pandemic – are unpredictable and have cascading and interdependent effects across the environment, economy and society. Addressing such issues requires embracing uncertainty and engaging in continuous adaptation and discovery, which stands in contrast to many standard project management tools. It entails a change in mindset, and embracing a very different approach to designing, running and funding development interventions. It also means rethinking risk, how we are set up as an organization, how we operate and what counts as success. This is a path that UNDP has embarked on, shifting to a new way of working by using portfolios as an integral part of our Strategic Plan 2022-2025.
As a result of our shared learning journey in Europe and Central Asia on how to respond more systematically, we’ve seen three pathways emerge: Sense, Position, Transform. These pathways facilitate the understanding of the context and dominant narratives, discovering where to intervene for greatest impact, and how to continuously make sense of the situation. They can be adapted and applied to different contexts based on need, interest and other conditions. The pathways seek to respond to three questions that have repeatedly surfaced:
“Silos create the illusion that development challenges can be resolved by working in isolation,” says UN Deputy-Secretary General Amina J. Mohammed. With projects as a unit of delivery, we observe that knowledge, expertise, and resources like data are locked at the project level. Beyond reporting requirements, the question that emerges is how to create a space for connection, reflection and learning in order to take into account the rich experiences of projects and/or programmes.
Sense is there to provide a snapshot! The purpose is to strengthen programmatic coherence, improve flows of information, map out distribution of current projects against the local system, harmonize use of resources, and iteratively identify new spaces of intervention.
In 2020 UNDP Kosovo* embarked on this pathway to systematically review the immediate and long-term COVID-19 response. This process enabled a better collective understanding current responses and new opportunities for future programming. New opportunities were identified, including economic empowerment, private sector involvement in the green economy and capability development towards a more resilient health system. Since then, the office has continued to use the approach to dynamically manage the Country Programme Document (CPD), which has resulted in the development of a digital transformation portfolio, steps taken towards adopting evidence-based decision-making and identification of new, interdisciplinary entry points, like the environmental-justice nexus as a strategic area.
In addition to mapping existing projects and programmes, country teams that wanted to position delved deeper to identify and design strategic entry points for interventions that would accelerate system transformation around key development challenges. In this pathway, offices and partners reframe issues, examine the broader system, and identify strategic entry points where UNDP and/or its partners bring value.
Utilizing the Position pathway tools, UNDP Uzbekistan, together with the regional sustainable development and innovation teams, identified strategic entry points for their Future of Work portfolio. They looked at the conditions, needs, and resources around the work ecosystem, taking into account the impact of COVID-19, climate change, and emerging socio-economic and political factors on the workforce. The Future of Work complements existing country office projects in the area with a set of connected interventions. The three identified areas of interest were a responsive labor market, social resilience and a green transition, whereas entry points included: the promotion of digital markets, data driven social protection and human capital for green investments. The process generated a new value proposition & entry points for programming to accelerate the transition to the future of work. Read about the process here.
Offices that have taken the pathway Transform, have rethought and expanded the problem definitions, created connections across different projects and programmes, identified activities that are strategic and iterated based on learnings. In our region, Armenia, Serbia, North Macedonia, Kosovo, Uzbekistan and Moldova, amongst others have deployed this process to address emergent challenges like depopulation, urban transformation and circularity. The outcome of running an adaptive portfolio is better harmonization of resources, stronger relevance and evidence towards where to invest for long-term solutions.
In Serbia the UNDP Country Office is tackling depopulation, a complex challenge for which traditional development thinking and single-point interventions would not have worked. The UNDP Serbia team crafted a Portfolio of Options as a way to deconstruct and respond to the driving factors of depopulation, and design integrated solutions holistically. The main task for their portfolio work was to develop a new framing and continue to identify the system leverage points. At the time of writing this blog, data challenges have provided new insights about the nature of population decline, and a multidisciplinary team has been set up in the Prime Minister’s Office to embed the portfolio in government. Read more about the work and journey here.
In Armenia, within the City Experiment Fund, the UNDP Country Office is tackling unemployment and depopulation issues in Stepanavan. The intent (mission) of the portfolio was to retain local talent and attract talent from outside of Sepanavan, which led to a set of interconnected interventions, including the development of an Aviation and IT Learning Center in the city, where the young people of Stepanavan will learn design & operations of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (drones) and their application in agriculture, forest protection and disaster risk reduction. Amongst other results, the portfolio created excitement among aviation enthusiasts, leading to expression of interest by a Czech company and university for a collaboration and development of an internationally certified programme and is being used as the basis for the five year strategic plan for the city. Read the full story here.
The pathways have a set of tools that are used and adapted based on the context, and show that there is more than one way of approaching systems change. The effects our teams seek is better information sharing, agility, targeted use of resources, supporting local ecosystems and continuous surfacing of new areas worth exploring. UNDP offices and our partners in the region continue to explore how to use these pathways and other tools for higher development effectiveness. Follow our space to hear more about the work of our community on system transformation.
As the practice on portfolio design and adaptive management continues expanding in our region, we’re keen to share, collaborate, learn with and from others in the space. If interested, reach out to us at: innovation.rbec@undp.org or say hi on our Twitter or LinkedIn page.
Special thanks for their leadership, guidance and review to Gerd Trogemann, Niels Knudsen, Doina Mointenau, Irena Cerovic, Tatevik Koloyan and other members of the regional innovation community. The pathways were generated by Andreas Pawelke and Saskia Hermann (formerly at CHORA Foundation), in collaboration with Elina Jarvela, Yaera Chung, Justyna Krol, Aditi Soni and Lejla Sadiku.
This blog reflects UNDP’s work in the region with CHORA Foundation, Agirre Lekhardia Center, Snowcone and other partners working on systems transformation.
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