Working together for climate resilience: Challenges and success factors for collaboration between technical and financial partners in development cooperation
This working paper seeks to shed light on challenges and entry points for practical collaboration between technical and financial development partners in projects on the ground. Using insights from several cases of practical collaboration, the paper means to:
- contribute to the understanding of how technical and financial organisations work together practically to create joint impact
- provide entry points for project managers and donor organisations on how to increase collaborative action between technical and financial partners
- and to stimulate further consideration, discussion and indepth analysis of the topic by project managers and organisations wishing to leverage synergies with other actors of development cooperation.
Even though relevant for most fields of development cooperation, the paper is primarily meant to inform practitioners working on building climate resilience through climate change mitigation and, in particular, adaptation.
Several key conclusions can be drawn:
- Firstly, technical and financial organisations can collaborate in different ways. This may include shaping their actions in ways that create (co-) benefits for the “other” side, explicitly teaming up and combining their strengths to achieve scaled-up impact, or contracting actors that can contribute specific expertise or resources.
- Secondly, collaborative action for sustainable development and climate action suffers from a number of barriers, ranging from tensions between organisations’ procedures to a lack of structures, resources and local framework conditions for bottom-up cooperation.
- Thirdly, the paper shows that certain measures can be taken to increase the number and effectiveness of partnerships.
- From the perspective of project managers, this may include activities such as building a joint narrative together with other projects, identifying and communicating synergies.
- Organisation- or programme-wide entry points also exist and could be used by strategic departments, partnership management teams or higher management levels of entities and initiatives.
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