Systems and portfolios
Portfolio practice helps bring together multiple lines of action around a shared challenge, creating space to learn, adapt, and connect strategy with experimentation.
Strategic innovation through learning portfolios in Europe and Central Asia
Many of the most pressing development challenges in the region are systemic: they cut across sectors, institutions, and time horizons. Economic shifts, green transition, digital disruption, institutional fragmentation, and financing gaps are converging in ways that demand more connected responses. They are shaped by uncertainty, interdependence, and fast-changing conditions. In this context, traditional linear planning is often not enough.
Portfolio practice helps bring together multiple lines of action around a shared challenge, creating space to learn, adapt, and connect strategy with experimentation. Rather than focusing only on standalone solutions, it supports a broader view of transformation – one that links immediate opportunities with longer-term systems change.
UNDP supports the use of portfolio practice as a way to work across these interconnected challenges – helping partners design, test, and evolve sets of interventions that can respond to complexity over time. In our region, this work currently spans urban transformation, digital transformation, and innovative finance – areas that are distinct but increasingly interdependent. This work also contributes to a broader institutional learning on how development systems can become more adaptive, strategic, and future-oriented.
Our focus
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Digital transformation
We explore how portfolio practice can support and shape strategic digital transformation, connecting technology, public innovation, institutional change, and emerging tools such as AI and blockchain to broader development outcomes. Rather than treating digitalization as a standalone technical agenda, we look at how it can be embedded within wider transformation processes.
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Urban transformation
We support portfolio-based work on complex territorial and urban challenges across the region, including local economic transformation, green and digital transitions, resilience, and governance. This includes providing support to municipalities, local systems actors, and UNDP country offices working on place-based transformation. Urban transformation is the most extensive area of the regional portfolio practice, anchored by two flagship initiatives that work with cities across Europe and Central Asia – the City Experiment Fund and Mayors for Economic Growth.
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Finance and investment pathways
We work on how portfolio thinking can strengthen finance-related practices, including investment readiness, financing pathways, partnership development, and the connection between innovation and implementation. This area is especially important where promising transformation efforts need stronger pathways toward resourcing, scaling, and institutional uptake.
How we support
We support UNDP Country Offices and partners across Europe and Central Asia to develop and apply the portfolio practice in response to complex development challenges. Our support is designed to help teams move from ideas to action, while building the capabilities, systems, and learning needed to adapt over time. Our work includes:
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We help strengthen the ability of UNDP and partners to work with complexity, use the portfolio practice effectively, and apply new ways of thinking across different thematic areas.
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We support the development of portfolios around complex challenges, helping teams move from framing and sensemaking to strategic intervention design and implementation.
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We support portfolio dynamic management and MEL processes so that portfolios can evolve over time, generate insights, and adapt to changing contexts.
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We design and facilitate learning journeys that build shared understanding and practical capability, including initiatives such as our Portfolio Course. We also provide trainings on topics that strengthen a future-ready portfolio practice.
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We provide hands-on technical accompaniment across different stages of portfolio development, including portfolio design and implementation, sensemaking, accelerator-style support, and advisory support for strategic portfolio development.
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Through regional programmes and Country Office support, we help enable experimentation and early-stage portfolio development through seed funds, grants, and targeted strategic support.
A new way to drive change
UNDP’s systems portfolio approach helps governments and partners navigate complexity, identify opportunities, and deliver change at scale.
Where work
Across the region, the portfolio practice has been applied in different ways to support UNDP Country Offices and partners working on complex, interconnected challenges. This has included strategic portfolio development, implementation support, capability building, and learning processes across a growing set of thematic areas. This work reflects the breadth of the regional portfolio practice: from territorial and economic development to digital transformation, circularity, green transition, and the future of work.
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Get in touch
Drop us an email at innovation@undp.org