Frequently Asked Questions

We explore the best alternatives for embedding the systems change process fostered by the Action Hub in collaboration with local stakeholders and the international community, placing change agents at the center of everything we do. The preference is to build on existing collaborative spaces and local organizational capacity to avoid duplication. In each location, we assess if there are other initiatives or institutions that are well placed to host the process triggered by the Action Hub or support it sustainably through, for example, financing using extractive revenues or international cooperation.

The Action Hub approach is a response to the interest we have identified through our ongoing work with local and global experts. It draws on recent research across a range of disciplines and aims to create a global community of practitioners and thinkers that can share thinking, experimental work, and learnings to improve the impact of governance and anti-corruption work in extractive settings. Within this global community, demand for experimentation will come from local stakeholders, either recommended by global partners or identified through our calls. In addition, the Governance Explorers’ Network seeks to amplify stories of change told by local stakeholders themselves and will provide an additional channel through which to identify demand for support. By being responsive to local challenges and priorities, including diverse stakeholder input, and testing solutions in an iterative way, we can increase our chances of success in spearheading systemic change.

At R4D, we believe local organizations need to be the drivers of change. R4D is committed to shifting the power and resources in global development to local coalitions of actors who are best placed to navigate change, with the support of flexible resources and tailored knowledge. In alignment with that belief, the Action Hub reinforces and provides an enabling environment for localization.

For local stakeholders, the Action Hub builds and promotes agency by bridging knowledge gaps, bringing local voices to the forefront of development strategies, and increasing confidence in the process by offering space and opportunity to test and implement ideas generated by local stakeholders. The creation of effective local coalitions makes it easier for donors, international finance institutions, and the international community to play its role as an external actor that can support local processes with resources, providing direct funding to a broader range of local organizations. The Action Hub facilitates information flows, offering a space for global and local ideas to be tested in response to local demand from existing organizations. Pilots are led by local stakeholders to support and strengthen local processes and strengthen local governance systems.

The collaborative platform offers companies a space led by an international, neutral third party that is not transactional in nature. Over time, we expect the Action Hub’s work to increase trust between the different types of stakeholders in each place where we work, by promoting alliances around common goals.

Our role is not to compete with existing efforts in each country or space, but rather to articulate existing and emerging efforts, while strengthening or complementing them. Specific activities will only be decided after engaging local stakeholders, government, and international cooperation initiatives; altogether identifying gaps, bottlenecks, and challenges.

Our strength is our ability to bring diverse actors with local knowledge, global knowledge, and flexible financial resources together to solve concrete challenges. We actively explore with stakeholders the frontiers of what is possible in tackling concrete challenges. Promising pilots can then be taken by government or the international community to be replicated or scaled up.

If there is an existing collaborative platform, we discuss with its members the challenges they face, the limitations of the platform, and look for ways to support an ecosystem for that effort to be more effective.

The Action Hub is the result of learning from our experience in country work done under Leveraging Transparency to Reduce Corruption (LTRC) and its TAP-Plus Approach to Anti-Corruption in the Natural Resource Value Chain, while also building on global knowledge and policy in the anti-corruption field from SOAS-ACE as well as USAID’s Anticorruption Policy (2022). In addition, we draw on recent research on local systems change from a variety of disciplines as well as evidence on the potential of coalitions for change and examples of how learning-centric approaches, such as human learning systems, can support systems change. Notably, the Asia Foundation’s Coalition for Change, the Accountability Research Centre’s Sandwich Strategy, and the Centre for Public Impact’s Human Learning Systems, all put local actors in the driver’s seat, navigating local contexts to find technically sound and politically feasible solutions to local problems. problems.

While consensus between stakeholders makes collective action easier, most communities are characterized by diverse opinions and interests. Effective collective action requires agreement on specific goals, which can be temporal or narrow in definition. Coalitions are action-oriented groups that bring diverse actors, including powerful insiders, to support a specific goal and require unity around a specific vision but not complete consensus.

At the global level, the Action Hub elicits alliances for learning and action between global and local stakeholders, recognizing that collaborative platforms provide a useful forum for collective problem-solving, testing new thinking, and learning from each other. We are cognizant that not every stakeholder in the platform will believe in the process simply because the space exists. That trust will need to be earned through concrete action that translates into perceived value for the participants and for other stakeholders that may not initially join precisely because of the limitations of past participatory processes.

In some cases, like our work in Moquegua, Peru, the type of solution implies significant coordination among different types of stakeholders, with implementation involving civil society (notably, a local university), companies, and the regional government. But the nature and scope of those projects will vary from project to project, and from country to country.

Working with complexity requires understanding the context and making parallel bets around plausible ways forward. Design thinking principles can be helpful to test out assumptions and try different ideas before taking them to scale. This testing is an important step in ensuring that solutions are well tailored to local realities and feasible, also considering including diverse interests and incentives. Over time, we would like to see this empowerment process of local stakeholders take on its own dynamic by forming local ecosystems of knowledge and practice, with companies, government, or international cooperation offering regular incentives to local stakeholders to test solutions to new challenges, using similar principles. We see governance and anticorruption as complex issues that require a constant process of adaptation and learning, as incentives and interests shift, new relationships form, and systems adjust.

At R4D, we believe it’s critical to coordinate action and strengthen the capacity of local partners and change agents to continue work after project funding ends. To uphold our commitment to provide cohesive support and ecosystems of expertise in the long term, the Action Hub will approach sustainability in three ways:

1. Embed the approach in local institutions so the activities of Action Hub can, with local leadership, continue beyond financial or technical support from R4D. We will work with local partners early on in identifying and preparing organizations for this.
2. Actively engage with and inform organizations able to replicate and scale up processes or learning to emerge from the Action Hub’s work.
3. Actively pursue business development opportunities throughout implementation. We have started an active identification of potential funders for different lines of work.