UNDP’s identity crisis: A journey from linear to adaptive project management

A personal reflection of the past year as the lead orchestrator for a joint EU & UNDP project called the Mayors for Economic Growth 

International development is for the most part executed through development projects. The UN Development Programme (UNDP) is no exception, and since our beginning some 60 years ago we have developed an overall solid programme and project management practice.  

Yet, the rapid changes and increasing complexities of global and local issues around inequalities, global warming, participatory governance, and public crises and emergencies, question our understanding of linear transformation reflected in our project management.  

Many of us working in international development are becoming uncomfortable with presenting ourselves as ‘solution providers’ as if we know what the destination looks like and how to get there. For many of today’s complex challenges and the polycrisis we find ourselves in, we have no ‘best practice’ to lean on. 

The thinking that we might be losing relevance due to our projectized approach and how we as an organization are exploring and learning to apply strategic innovation for system change is gaining traction among leading innovation colleagues and senior management, and I would argue is a growing discussion across the organization and sector. 

At times, in order to alleviate the pain, we apply #linear approaches to the problem, which can cause unintended consequences. When we disconsider the whole #system the problems we face are involved in, these consequences come back to us.”

SI Network 

At a first glance, the Mayors for Economic Growth (M4EG), a joint initiative with the European Union to support towns and cities in Eastern Partnership exploring new trajectories of growth, looks like a standard development project following the established rules and regulations, alongside the ongoing 4,500 projects within UNDP. But M4EG has another intention, that of being a sandbox to test what new handbooks in development could look like while embracing the radical uncertainty of our times.  

When we kicked M4EG off in 2021, we asked ourselves: if we accept that the world is complex and unpredictable, how can we inject ways to make our project management more agile, i.e., respond to issues, findings, and opportunities as they emerge? 

In some ways, the M4EG has an identity crisis, engaging in deep self-reflection. It straddles the existing frame and project approach, while riding towards what could emerge.   

Here are our key takeaways from a project management perspective. 

From the start, we designed M4EG for tolerance and adaptability to ensure timely responses and relevance. This flexibility allowed the project team to act faster and make many small and some larger changes over the first year of implementation, among which are: 

1. New mentoring programme for municipalities: We transformed the standard ‘call for proposals’ into a learning and mentoring journey called Urban Imaginaries Programme, based on a concept around Urban Makeover (vibrant communities + economic opportunities + innovative approaches) that has taken shape within our wider innovation team over the past years. This led to a partnership with the Centre for Public Impact, and the opportunity for 20 municipality teams to learn how to use and implement human-centered design with seed funds. 

2. New crisis reality in Ukraine and Moldova: The project quickly repurposed EUR 700,000 to support the new realities faced by our network members in Ukraine and Moldova. Consequently, the EU is topping up the existing funds with EUR 1.8m to form a M4EG-EU Response and Renewal Grant Programme to continue supporting municipalities that are currently occupied, at the frontlines, or hosting Ukrainians that are internally displaced or refugees in Moldova.  

3. Financing links: Knowing that one set of time-constrained project funds will not result in the system transformation we seek, it became evident that UNDP and the EU need to play a stronger role as a bridge and orchestrator for new funding opportunities and partnerships for local authorities. When an EU-led Team Europe initiative, including with International Financing Institutions (IFIs), was launched for the Syunik region in Armenia, the EU called for increased engagement with municipalities in that region. In response, M4EG embedded the largest municipality in the region in the Portfolio Journey programme (going hyperlocal to design and dynamically manage portfolios for system transformation). Simultaneously, to support more of the municipalities in the region, we are launching an accelerated Synch Programme for local economic development (LED) planning to kick start the design of bankable projects that can attract financing. 

4. From local economic development plans to SYNCH: To switch from linear local economic development planning, the existing LED process under the first phase of the M4EG took on a system lens approach and moved towards continuous and adaptive planning to better stay in synch with changing needs and factors. The first pilot with our partners at Ove Arup and Climate KIC is taking place in Baghdati, Georgia. 

5. Show and Tell platform: Intentional co-design of interventions is a new approach for most M4EG members and requires stamina, patience, and more time than pre-defined interventions. The 4 to 6 months-long design phase for the first cohort of 13 towns and cities called for a celebration and peer-to-peer exchange in the form of a regional visibility event at the mid-year turn.  

6. Embedding storytelling: In addition to introducing storytelling as an untapped skill for municipality teams to shape local narratives, it became necessary for a change-orientated initiative like the M4EG to come with a clear future-ready identity. A new attractive brand was co-designed with the EU, with an intentional push for implementation and communication to increasingly go hand-in-hand. So far, more than 200,000 people have been reached in the Eastern Partnership. 

The M4EG’s identity sits between being a discovery and learning journey for system transformation, and the UN development project frame for operational effectiveness and expenditure delivery as performance indicators.  

To rise above operationalization, our key starting point is not ‘how many workshops and providers are needed,’ but rather ‘what are the emerging needs and realities for our set intention for more sustainable, inclusive, vibrant communities, and how could we best support?’ 

The M4EG intends to be tolerant and responsive, with a mixture of the relaxed and the precise. It has so far allowed the donor, implementer, partners, and beneficiaries to add a bit of themselves, to help adapt and customize, to be partners in a mission. We see a donor bringing in new partners and exploring new avenues, mayors utilizing the optimistic and colorful M4EG brand to strengthen their local visions, technical partners interested in co-testing new tools and approaches, and UNDP colleagues across teams asking to join in what has become an invitation for change. As Charles Laundry shares in his book on shaping a creative bureaucracy: “Every [bureaucrat] has a vast storehouse of “discretionary” effort, [and] many more are waiting in the wings to contribute more”. 

Projects appear across today’s disciplines and is a taken for granted modus operandi for non-routine goals. International development is no exception and arguably has become shaped by a ‘project hegemony’. Could we test ourselves out of this universality? 

“Once we denaturalize the project form, we can more clearly imagine alternatives to it. If not every action or every vision for the future amounts to a project, then what else is there? What kinds of transformation might practices of radical care (Hobart and Kneese 2020) or of ‘staying with trouble’ (Haraway 2016) yield? Why don’t we choose to de-projectify some social environments, for example, to ask what work or development might look like without perpetual projects?” (2021, Andrew Graan, What was the project? Thoughts on genre and the project form) 

Background:  

In 2021 UNDP, together with the EU, launched the Mayors for Economic Growth (M4EG), a regional initiative hosting a network of some 350 municipalities in the Eastern Partnership – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine. The M4EG’s intention is to demonstrate and inspire secondary cities’ new trajectories of growth to become more attractive and vibrant for people and financing.