ARDD & GMI COLLABORATION

The Renaissance Strategic Centre of the Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development (ARDD) civil society organisation, and GMI have formally come together to facilitate dialogue and exchange knowledge and experiences between stakeholders, to enhance civic space internationally and nationally. This aligns with ARDD’s broader objectives under the Arab Transformation Programme, on civic space, civil society and localisation.

Our November 2024 webinar examined collective leadership. Collective leadership is not easy as most of us are used to top-down leadership. Inevitably, individuals and organisations who come together for a shared purpose, also have diverging interests, and will want to get something for themselves out of the collaboration, not just give their time, energy, ideas and resources to it. In this webinar we explored what makes collective leadership work, what challenges to it frequently arise, and how they can best be dealt with.

The insights of the participants, but especially of the panelists Naomi Tulay-Tsolanke, Apollo Gabazira and Manal Wazani, as well as the learning from others, on Network Weaving, Impact Networks and collective impact, are captured in this new guidance paper, full of practical tips: Collective Leadership - Making it Work.

RISK SHARING IN PRACTICE. Getting Started.

Are you part of several organisations collaborating for a shared purpose? How do you handle ‘risk’ between you? Does one try to transfer risk to the other? Does one try to absorb some risk on behalf of the other? Do you ‘share’ certain risks – and if so, how does that happen in practice?

Why, in the first place, would you share risks? Perhaps because of a pragmatic, instrumental reason: If a serious threat happens to one of the collaborating agencies, this will affect everyone’s ability to achieve the shared purpose or objective. Or because of a more ethical consideration: If you consider your collaboration a genuine partnership, you may accept an ethical duty of care and solidarity with each even if there is no legal obligation for it.

The question of risk transfer, risk absorption and/or risk sharing in recent years has come to the foreground between aid agencies, particularly those working in volatile and dangerous environments. But it poses itself also for private sector or public-private sector collaborations.

This new GMI brief details how this complex and at times also sensitive conversation between collaborating agencies can be started and structured.

It builds on the work of the Risk Sharing Platform, which has been leading on this topic in the aid sector,  but also goes beyond it by taking a somewhat different approach:
·       It adds some risk categories to the eight recognised by the Risk Sharing Platform (health and safety, security, legal/compliance, financial/fiduciary, information; operational; ethical; and reputational risks), notably ‘political risks’, risks to  ‘organisational stability’ and risks to the willingness and ability to collaborate for collective impact (i.e. because of the strong incentives for competition in the international aid sector).
·       It includes risks for the people and populations we seek to assist: How aid agencies manage their risks, individually or collaboratively, can have impacts on the risks to which people-in-greater-need are exposed.
·       We make an important differentiation between risks that originate from outside the collaboration chain, and others that originate from within the collaboration chain. Read more here.

DONORS AND INTERMEDIARIES: Critical self-awareness and a conversation guide

Given that aid donors will continue to use intermediaries, this second paper focuses on what donors can and must do to ensure that intermediaries use their power responsibly, strive towards equitable partnership with national and local subgrantees, and intentionally work towards role changes, with the national-local actor taking on more and more leadership. The paper consists of three components:

1. A practical conversation guide for donors to use, proactively, with organisations they intend to fund which in turn will subgrant to (other) national and local actors.
2.  An invitation for back-donors to be self-critical about how their behaviours influence how an intermediary organisation plays that role: sometimes donor requirements are such that it becomes difficult for an intermediary organisation to play a truly supportive and enabling role for its local and national subgrantees/partners.
3. An answer to the question whether a direct communication is appropriate between a back-donor and a LNA which receives its funds through an intermediary. Access the paper here.

INTERMEDIARY ORGANISATIONS UNDER THE SPOTLIGHT - WHY?

In 2016, at the World Humanitarian Summit, all the big players in the international humanitarian aid system, committed to ‘better support and reinforce national and local actors’. Since then, the roles and behaviours of notably international aid agencies, acting as ‘intermediaries’, have come under closer review.

 ‘Intermediary’ aid organisations are those that pass on part or all of the funding they receive from a ‘back-donor’ (typically a bilateral or multilateral, but this can also be a foundation or a corporate sponsor) to a local or national actor (mostly governmental, non-governmental or community-based). The ‘intermediation’ role therefore is fundamentally related to the flow of funding.

In the current global aid system, most intermediaries are international entities such as UN agencies, INGOs, international financial institutions, donor Red Cross societies, Western research, training and consultancy outfits, and Western for-profit contractors. This also includes pooled funds, managed by the UN or by others. But there are also national agencies acting as intermediaries who subgrant to more local ones and/or directly to target groups. Examples are the Manusher Jonno Foundation in Bangladesh; larger Myanmar NGOs who in 2022 came together in a Local Intermediary Actor Network, and in future perhaps, the National Network for Local Philanthropy Development in Ukraine (initially co-hosting a fund together with the Start Network).

This briefing paper looks at why ‘back-donors’ use them. It unpacks how intermediaries can add value but can also abuse their power over national and local actors they sub-grant to. Abusive behaviour can come from specific individuals, but unjust practices can be more structurally embedded in how an organisation sees its intermediation role, and its wider organisational culture and self-image. Organisations playing intermediary roles now can and must reflect self-critically about how they choose to play that role. Find the first paper here. 

A next briefing paper will offer practical guidance for the conversations back-donors can and must have with those they fund in intermediary roles.

BEHAVIOURAL EXPECTATIONS IN MULTI-STAKEHOLDER STEERING GROUPS

Different organisations can come together behind a shared purpose, and set up a joint steering or governance group, to direct it in a form of collective leadership. We see this for networks, joint programmes or even the multi-stakeholder governance of an organisation of central interest to all. We have also repeatedly observed how such collective leadership can be profoundly disrupted by behaviour of some of its members, who prioritise their own organisational interests, want to impose their own choice against the majority decision, and may become disrespectful to those with a different view. Even collective leadership groups who have formalised most of their functioning tend to struggle with such situation, as they have not rendered explicit fundamental behavioural expectations of members of a collective leadership group. Our advice: make them explicit. See our 2 pager for more detail here.

EVALUATING PEACE MEDIATION AND PEACEBUILDING in ONGOING CONFLICT. What have we learned about good practices in peace mediation and peacebuilding?

A clearer understanding of the meaning of the OECD/DAC evaluation criteria is not however of direct help to peace actors who intervene in volatile and uncertain environments and try to figure out how they can be most relevant, effective, and efficient, nor for donors who try to assess the potential of different proposed interventions to be so. A second possible source of insight is what we have learned from the collective experiences in mediation and peacebuilding over the past 20 years.

This second briefing paper summarises key such insights. These are not ‘best practices’ that are valid across all contexts and at any moment. There is no blueprint design or technical-methodological manual that, if followed, is guaranteed to resolve the conflict. They constitute ‘good practices’ that seem to increase the likelihood that individual and collective efforts will, eventually (but no one can confidently predict when), have positive influences on a vicious circle of violence and distrust. When and how precisely to apply them will remain a matter of situational judgment by the peace actor. Access the paper here.

NEXUS-LOCALISATION-RESILIENCE PROGRAMMING. Are they connected and what does it mean in practice?

This briefing paper looks at what problem(s) ‘nexus approaches’ are supposed to address. It then explains how a ‘nexus approach’ or, as some prefer, ‘resilience programming’, is fundamentally reliant on local actors’ agency, and therefore directly linked to the active inclusion and support for local and national actors that the ‘localisation/national ownership/local capacities for peace’ commitments imply. It provides an overview of identified good nexus- or resilience programming practices, which are very similar to those supporting ‘localisation’. It acknowledges multiple good examples around the world, but also lists key factors that make the international aid system still unfit to enable this more systematically. Access the brief here.

EVALUATING PEACE MEDIATION AND PEACEBUILDING in ONGOING CONFLICT. Correct use of the OECD evaluation criteria and implications for evaluations and evaluators

Peace mediation and peacebuilding are notoriously difficult endeavours. Many actors are definitely beyond the ‘control’ of the mediators or peacebuilders, very difficult to influence or even hard to reach. Most conflicts evolve into a set of interlocking conflict dynamics, with international, regional, national and local layers that are interconnected but also have somewhat different driving factors and key actors.

Yet donors, as well as mediators, want to assess, even ‘evaluate’ the ‘effectiveness’ and ‘impact’ of their actions. The question is: What is the reference, what are relevant criteria? Two main reference sources can be used: the OECD evaluation criteria, and what we have learned, from years of comparative experience, about practices that increase the likelihood of having some positive influence or impact.

This brief focuses on the OECD evaluation criteria and how applicable they are to peace mediation and peacebuilding. It observes that there is significant misunderstanding, among those commissioning such evaluations and sometimes among evaluators themselves, about the realities of peace mediation and peacebuilding, certainly in ongoing conflict situations, and ignorance of how the OECD advises they be used.

It concludes with the observation that evaluating peace mediation and/or peacebuilding is by no means only a matter of methodological competence. That has important implications for the choice of reviewers and evaluators. Read the brief here. 

How donors can promote equitable partnerships

The demand for system change in the international relief sector is increasing. Local actors in aid-recipient countries but also many individuals working in international relief agencies, want to see an end to the structures and behaviours of inequality, and a system that enables much more equitable inclusion of many local actors. Operational international agencies argue that donors prevent this from happening with their policies, procedures and requirements. Donors on the other hand state that it is the international relief agencies (UN, INGOs, but also private contractors) who are unwilling or unable to change. This paper provides practical tips but also questions for reflection for institutional donors, in the first place public aid administrations and some private foundations. The full paper is richly referenced; for a quick grasp of the key points, see the executive summary. Full report and the Executive summary.