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.