By Patrick Watt
Our world today is beset by complex crises, from climate change to conflict and displacement, to unsustainable debt, which carry the heaviest cost for the poorest people.
None of these crises can be tackled except through collective action. Meeting complex, collective challenges with fragmented, siloed responses is bound to blunt our effectiveness. Yet, as international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) we continue to behave as if most of the solutions to these problems sit inside, rather than outside, our organisations. A ‘scarcity’ mindset dominates, in which management and boards focus on the resources under their direct control, to the exclusion of what we might catalyse and complement beyond our organisational boundaries. Too often, official donors make this problem worse, by the signals they send to INGOs, fostering competition over collaboration, and making locally led development and humanitarian programmes more costly than direct operations implemented by INGO staff.
This scarcity and control mindset needs to be replaced by an ‘abundance and collaboration’ mindset. If we look beyond our individual organisations, there is an almost limitless pool of creativity, knowledge and agency, not least among people affected by poverty. Yet as a sector, we are much better at talking about people in poverty, than with them. We spend remarkably little time listening to, learning from, and taking seriously the agency of affected communities, or opening ourselves to being genuinely accountable.
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