Last week’s blog began answering the question that many in multi-stakeholder change networks hear :  “So what is it you actually do?”  I wrote about the first two activities of such Global Action Networks (GANs) listed in the Table, and now I’ll explain more about the other four activities.

Networks, Learning and Research

Learning is a core part of most GANs’ work, since how to realize their goals is not always obvious and participants’ capacity to contribute to reaching them must be developed. However, GANs often have a remarkably underdeveloped sense of this work. At a meeting of GAN staff who had roles in developing knowledge and learning, they all said that they had very few resources and learning outcomes and strategies were poorly defined. Nevertheless, GANs put an enormous part of their resources into learning, when all the meetings and time in conversation to develop knowledge and capacity are taken into account.

Learning is a key activity of the Global Compact, as it develops lessons to share amongst companies on how the UN principles it promotes can be implemented. It is also a key activity of the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict (GPPAC), which similarly organizes participants into regional learning groups and shares lessons across them.

For the GANs in health care, research is a particularly important activity. Often this is a traditional type of research:  half of the Stop TB’s 10-year work plan concerns R&D for new vaccines. The GANs support collaborative development of this research, bringing together government, civil society, and commercial organizations with their distinctive expertise and capabilities.

Networks, Measuring and Certifying

Certification is a popular organizing strategy to realize change. Production of goods and services is assessed in terms of social, environmental, and economic standards, and GANs certify whether those standards have been met. The International Social and Environmental Accreditation and Labelling Alliance (ISEAL) is an association of GANs, including the Marine Stewardship Council, Social Accountability International, and the fair trade groups associated with the Fair Labelling Organization.

Several GANs make development of impact measurement frameworks and infrastructure a core part of their work. Although the Global Reporting Initiative does not actually get involved in measurement or certification, it develops the frameworks for companies to assess their impact in terms of social, economic, and environmental outcomes. And in fact, most ISEAL members do not actually do the certification, although they certify the certifiers. Transparency International also has an important measurement program, with its Corruption Perceptions Index that rates countries. And The Access Initiative’s (TAI’s) core strategy has to do with the broader measurement concept of “assessing” countries’ fulfillment of their commitments in the Rio Declaration to access to information, participation, and justice in environmental decision-making.

Networks and Financing

The Global Water Partnership (GWP) exemplifies a GAN formed by donors who want to give scale to their efforts by pooling financial resources. The network has been supported financially by many developed countries. For these funders, the GWP is an economical way to achieve the overall goals of promoting social equity, economic efficiency, and environmental sustainability, by improving the way water is managed and developed.

This pooling of financial resources is at the heart of most of the health GANs, like the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. The latter is financially by far the largest of any GAN: in the 8 years following its 2002 founding it had approved funding of US$ 19.3 billion for more than 572 programs in 144 countries.

As well the GAN structure often facilitates approaching funders.  For example, GANs can put together proposals that cover a much larger geographic area and be of a much large scale than their individual participants or regional components.  This can make them more attractive to the funders.

Networks and Advocating

GANs’ advocating strategy usually resembles a co-learning approach across traditional divides, rather than a traditional lobbying and pressuring strategy. This is demonstrated by TAI. TAI takes a learning approach when conducting “assessments” of governments’ performance vis-à-vis their commitments to provide access to information, participation, and justice in environmental decision-making.

Although NGOs are in control of TAI, “TAI members recognize that governments are not monolithic; they are filled with allies and opponents,” comments Joe Foti, TAI Associate. This leads to a diversity of TAI advocacy strategies with the goal of governments co-participating in the actual process of assessing. TAI country coalitions find that it usually helps to conduct the assessments in close relationship with a supportive government agency, such as the national Ministry of Environment that is usually weak on finance, political power, and science. In Thailand the TAI coalition includes an institute sponsored by the King of Thailand, which gives it legitimacy in government eyes. And in Africa, the TAI-Cameroon representative was actually asked to advocate to other governments and speak on his government’s behalf at a UNEP Governing Council meeting on access to information, participation, and justice in environmental decision-making.

Of course GANs integrate these six strategies. For example, The Climate Group focuses in particular on bringing together local and state/provincial governments and business. One project demonstrates the effectiveness of outdoor LED lighting with city government. This requires bringing together LED experts, financial institutions to finance the city’s investments, and local government. Bjorn Roberts, Corporate Partnership Manager for The Climate Group comments: “We make (climate change) a compelling topic for all, and put it on their agenda. The conversations don’t happen unless people are put together.” Through The Climate Group, a local city project becomes a global pilot. It combines the strategies of shared visioning of green cities, system organizing by bringing together the diverse partners, learning with the pilot, financing through developing new financial instruments, and advocating with other cities to follow the pilot.

This table aims to provide an analytical tool for networks to ask questions about their own strategies.  What are they doing in each area?  Which ones are they strong in?  Which ones should they develop further.  I hope you find it helpful!

“So what is it you actually do?” is a common question of anyone who works in a multi-stakeholder change network like a Global Action Network (GAN).  Building on work done with others, I now answer that there are six particular functions for such networks that fall under their broad role as change agents.  A network usually does more than one, but focuses on only one or two.

These are summarized in the Table, and the first two are discussed further. This Table can be used to assess a network’s activities.  Is it using all the activities?  If not, why not?  Does it need to do all of them? Which activities is it particularly good at?  Which should it strengthen?  How?

Shared Visioning

This is associated not just with a visionary statement, but also a statement of principles and ways to operationalize that vision.  However, this vision is never really “complete”.  The vision needs continual renewal with new participants as they join.  Also, the vision continues to develop as GANs operationalize it and give it greater precision and meaning.

The visioning is often associated with putting an issue on “the global agenda” – making it something people take up as an issue and challenge.  The Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict, for example, put “conflict prevention” with NGOs as well as governments having a key role, on the global agenda.

The visioning activity also engages people and organizations that are not participants in the GANs, typically through “campaigns”.  The Climate Group organizes big events with big names at strategic moments.  For example, it organized Climate Week in New York four months in advance of the Copenhagen Climate Summit, with the UN, the City, business leaders, the Carbon Disclosure Project and others.  Participants included the Secretary General of the UN with former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.

For the Principles in Responsible Investment (PRI), this is represented by the six principles themselves. The opening statement of the principles refers to “…act(ing) in the best long-term interests of our beneficiaries” as an over-all vision.  One of the PRI principles that follows is “We (signatories) will incorporate environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) issues into investment analysis and decision-making processes.”  What that means in actual action is a key part of PRI’s work.  PRI gives an illustration on its web-site of seven types of action this can involve.  The initial vision-setting can take considerable time and effort, as described in the next chapter on development stages.

System Organizing

System organizing is a key, on-going piece of almost all GANs’ work.  It involves creating links (bridging “structural holes” in the words of social network analyst Ron Burt) that facilitate gaining scale and exchanges of knowledge and resources.  Perhaps most importantly the links and GANs as a platform provide opportunities for coordination among sub-groups, and the critical overall development of “coherence” (improved alignment of network participants’ efforts for change as discussed in an earlier blog).

This can vary with the GAN’s particular development stage and shifting priorities.  For Ecoagriculture Partners, organizing was an initial driver, then people realized that their needed to be greater clarity about what it wanted participants to actually do, and increasing numbers of participants was put on the back burner for a while.  A GAN might stall in its push for system organizing, and essentially become a “club” for a small group of organizations in more of a partnership-like mode.

Ernst Ligteringen, Chief Executive of the Global Reporting Initiative points to the importance of system organizing, saying:  “It is really being multi-stakeholder, building bridges, helping different groups to understand each other.   There’s still a big gulf between civil society and business.   In the mainstream the views are still informed by prejudices and vie from one’s own constituencies rather than experience working with the other.”

System organizing is also associated with questions about governance renewal.  As a GAN grows, it must find new ways of engaging increasing numbers of participants in the decision-making processes.

The other four functions will be discussed next week.

There are many different ways to approach impact measurement, but using the wrong methods can actually undermine a change network’s efforts. The value of appropriate impact measurement is that it not only helps explain to funders their return on investment, but it also is an important tool for priority-setting, decision-making and managing.

Traditional evaluation approaches come from an industrial “in-put/out-put” model.  This is fine for simple tasks, but it is inappropriate for complicated and complex tasks that are part and parcel of change networks.

Simple, Complicated and Complex Activities

Three key differences in these types of tasks in the Table reveal that a change network does all three activities.  However, these networks are distinguished by an over-arching mission that requires complex activities.  Therefore, although the networks need impact measurement methods that will address all three activities, their umbrella measurement method must accommodate complexity.

In change networks, the need for methods that can address complicated and complex activities is evidenced in a number of ways, such as:

• Methods for evaluating simple tasks can not address the complications of the interaction in network participants’ relationships.
• There is not one, but an emergent number of possible pathways that require exploration and development to address issues such as ending corruption, creating sustainable forestry and integrating triple bottom line imperatives into corporations.
• Change networks’ visions require a long time to realize.  With all the change in their operating environments over that time, adaptive strategies are required, although simple ones can be good for relatively short-term sub-initiatives.
• Change networks usually do not aim to “take credit” for the actual valued outcomes (such as healthy, happy people).  They aim for a back seat in favor of their participants’ being recognized for their work. This makes attribution, a cornerstone of traditional impact measurement, highly problematic.

The demands of complex systems are reflected in “developmental evaluation” (DE), both an approach and title of a book by Michael Quinn Patton about to be released.  Michael writes:

“Developmental evaluation supports innovation development to guide adaptation to emergent and dynamic realities in complex environments. …  Informed by systems thinking and sensitive to complex nonlinear dynamics, developmental evaluation supports social innovation and adaptive management.  Evaluation processes include asking evaluative questions, applying evaluation logic, and gathering real-time data to inform ongoing decision making and adaptations.”[1]

As in action research strategies, the evaluator is part of the development team from beginning to end, rather than someone who comes in at the end to simply do a post facto analysis.

Two Examples

Ricardo Wilson-Grau, a colleague who works with the DE approach, points out there is a number of methodologies that can be used under that heading.  He has, for example, practiced DE using Outcome Mapping with the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict (GPPAC) and the Global Water Partnership (GWP).

Ricardo explains that traditional evaluation poses questions such as:

• Were problems encountered in implementing the change strategy solved in a way that is faithful to the model?
• To what extent have the intervention model’s specified outcomes been achieved?
• What has been learned about how to fully and faithfully replicate the model?

DE, however, is more interested in answering other questions about the strategy as something in development. For example, the Global Platform for the Prevention of Armed Conflict (GPPAC) introduced an Outcome Mapping in 2007 as a planning tool. In 2009, Ricardo advised on:

• How can the success of Outcome Mapping be judged so far?
• How can Outcome Mapping now be developed as an evaluation/monitoring system vis-à-vis results?

The first question was a reflection on the system itself;  the second was about further development of the system.  Based on those findings, GPPAC is now further developing Outcome Mapping.

Another example is with the GWP.  GWP operates in a highly complex, dynamic environment. It has thousands of members who are constantly changing, grouped into 60-70 country water partnerships, whose actual number at any given moment is unknown.  These country partnerships are grouped  into 13 regional water partnerships with a global secretariat in Stockholm.concerns the approach to measurement. Over ten years they had placed the issue of integrated water resource management on the environmental agenda.

In traditional evaluation performance and success are measured against predetermined goals and SMART outcomes: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. DE is quite different.  With Ricardo’s support GWP created a monitoring procedure to apply DE principles to  develop measures and tracking mechanisms as outcomes emerge. They introduced the procedure into one region and, according to what did and did not work, adjusted it for the next region. That is, the measures could change as the process unfolded. They tracked the forks in the road – specifically how different regions had to adjust the monitoring procedure – and used this information to point out the implications of key decisions as the innovative monitoring system evolved. Consequently, their donors are being informed of the governmental policy and practice changes that GWP – directly or indirectly, usually partially and often sometimes unintentionally – influences.  That’s simple, complicated and complex.

Ricardo is an independent evaluator and organizational consultant based in Brazil and the Netherlands. He can be reached at ricardo.wilson-grau@inter.nl.net.

---

[1] Patton, M. Q. (2010). Development Innovation:  Applying Complexity Concepts to Enhance Innovation and Use. New York, NY, USA, Guilford Press.

Last week I spoke with Ger Berkamp, Director General of the World Water Council (WWC) and later with Peter van Tuijl, Director  of the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict (GPPAC).  Each conversation turned to the question “What knowledge, skills and capabilities does your network need to be really successful?”

In both cases, we turned to the competencies framework in Figure 1.  And in both cases when the question arose about what may be missing in this framework, Ger and Peter brought up power and politics.

“The political management of the network…it needs taken care of as a political process,” said Ger.

“Capacity to deal with power differences,” said Peter.  “It misses the political edge – for the network both internally and externally.”

Daily both Ger and Peter deal with diverse demands and interests to move the network towards its vision.  In their positions they have leadership responsibility with their Boards, major stakeholder groups, and particularly influential individuals.

With “politics and power” they are talking about the ability to mobilize support for and/or opposition to policies, values and goals. Internally, they are talking about the ability to work with power differences inherent with the array of constituencies in a global multi-stakeholder network. Externally, they are talking about the ability of the network to influence organizations that are not active participants in the network.

However, in a network like WWC and GPPAC, there is a huge gray area of internal-external.  Even if an organization is a participant in the networks, the organization does not automatically agree with the network decisions, move to implement them or even know how to implement them.

Sociologist Amatai Etzioni categorizes power into three types.  As voluntary associations the networks have little coercive power generally associated with governments.  They have little remunerative power generally associated with business – they simply don’t have the financial or other resources to allocate.  They must depend upon normative power:  peer pressure, persuasion of logic and moral assertion of what’s right and just.

However, others have coercive and remunerative power that they may apply to influence the direction of the network – either in support of the network’s goals or to undermine them.  This is always particularly worrisome vis-à-vis funders.  Transparency International is currently facing the coercive power with intimidation by the Government of Sri Lanka against its Chapter there.

Power and politics is a topic of the Leadership competency:  how can individuals, groups and the network share leadership to create a leaderful^[1] culture and way of working together?  And how do we address power-play leadership?

Power and politics is a topic for the Network Development competency where the question becomes how to create strategies, structures and processes to manage power in the interests of the larger network.  This involves ensuring and balancing diverse stakeholders’ voice and influence.

Power and politics is also a big topic of the Generative Change competency.  Transformational change of the type that Global Action Networks (GANs) like WWC and GPPAC aim for, involves a fundamental change in power and political arrangements. The core work of GANs is to realize a “tipping point” where the values and standards promoted by the GAN become “the norm”.

Of course there is lots of overlap among the competencies. Generative Change, Network Development and Leadership competencies are all needed to clarify, address and create accountability for contributing to two sets of goals:  those of individual participants (organizations, Board members) that are conditions for being active in the network, and also for the network’s goals to realize its vision.

One goal of the competencies framework is to suggest how to organize capacity-building programs for GANs.  Business schools are organized around core functional divisions like Marketing and Finance;  schools of government are organized around divisions reflected in Ministries such as justice (law),  health and international relations.

We are still a bit unclear about how to think of core functions of GANs and the key competencies, since they are a relatively young type of organization.  The suggestion here is that GANs will often develop a department for Network Development (seen with GPPAC’s Network Building Programme and titles such as Transparency International’s “Governance Manager”).  The Generative Change competency is probably the most under-recognized one of all, but one that I feel particularly strongly about.  GANs are strategies for global change, and yet in general they make little use of leading change knowledge and have not built capacity for dialogic change skills, for example.

What competencies do you think are particularly important?  Join a webinar next Wednesday to further discuss the competencies and key frameworks to support their development.  For more information click here.

---

[1] I’m indebted to my colleague Joe Raelin for development of this concept.