How can institutional innovation be catalysed? This paper argues that societies’ overall learning capacities need to be enhanced in ways that enable greater responsiveness and resilience to emerging risks. To change institutions, ‘soft’ capacities are needed: communication, trust-building, diplomacy, networking, making sense of messy social situations, political advocacy and leadership. Specifically, it is important to be able to navigate complexity, learn collaboratively, engage politically and to be self-reflective.
The modern world is faced with threats which demand goal-orientated and purposeful change. At the same time, history, a deeper understanding of institutions, complexity theory and political science all point to the fallacy of believing that social, economic and political change can be easily controlled and directed. To resolve this dilemma, a fundamental rethink about the notion and focus of capacity development is necessary.
Capacity development is more than the transfer of technical knowledge and skills. It must include a process of strengthening relationships that enable innovation and resilience in communities, organisations and societies. This means tackling change processes and creating governance mechanisms bottom-up by distributing understanding, improving feedback links and enhancing capacities for adapting to change in a dispersed and non-hierarchical, yet coordinated, manner. Four key capabilities are:
- Navigating complexity. In complex situations it is important to test out a range of interventions to see which ones work or fail then use this knowledge for scaling up or replicating. Identifying ‘best’ and ‘good’ practices is pointless for complex problems. It is important to be able to recognise complexity and to understand the implications for planned interventions. Working with complex situations is as much about attitudes as it is to do with practical tools.
- Learning collaboratively. Interaction between government, business, civil society and citizens is needed to truly solve problems, and this is what ultimately leads to innovation. Investment in the capacities needed for multi-stakeholder engagement and collaborative learning is therefore essential.
- Engaging politically. Institutional innovation involves challenging, disturbing and sometimes overthrowing existing dynamics of authority and power. Any individual, organisation or network wanting to engage politically needs to be able to: i) see and critically examine power relations; ii) make judgements about what sort of political engagement is appropriate; iii) lobby, advocate and influence policy; and iv) use the media (and internet) in all its forms.
- Being self-reflective. It is important to invest in activities and processes that give people the time and space to develop themselves and their self-understanding. It is also important to: include feelings as a normal part of discussion in collaborative processes of change; recognise that the emotional and self-reflective aspects of development demand ‘safe’ environments for people; and create environments of trust in which people can give and receive honest feedback.
