GCRF Compass+: Comprehensive Capacity-Building in Central Eurasia
Tackling sustainability challenges through the lens of resilience
GCRF COMPASS+ Research Impact Forum on 26th Jan 2023 brought together global development experts from policy, practice and academia to examine the new challenges faced by the ODA countries of Central Eurasia, and seek policy solutions to the unjust, fragile and geopolitically unstable world of today.
Communities could become more adaptable by: developing a coherent vision (a ‘sense of the good life’) and emergency scenarios for the future; accessing resources that could help them achieve this vision and mobilising their voice to shape policy decisions.
Regional sustainable governance issues can be tackled by accepting diversity, and engaging with local traditions, as well as developing new institutions grounded firmly in empathetic leadership and bottom-up decision making rather than top-down decision making.
Embed resilience in global governance institutions by reconciling diversity; and building inclusive, internationally balanced and responsive, goal-orientated institutions and governance structures collectively responding to challenges and developing cooperative futures.
This brief expands on these key messages and goes through the core policy and governance recommendations that came out of our discussions.
Fostering responsive, agile and adaptable communities
Develop multiple plans for the future, including emergency response plans.
While it is impossible to predict and prepare for every potential threat, the exercise of creating response plans develops resilience by raising awareness that rapid, momentous changes can occur at any time.
In developing and/or being made aware of emergency plans and plans for the future, community members will become more flexible and adaptable to potential change.
Communities should have a vision for the future to demonstrate to their constituent parts that they will continue to meet their needs. Communities need resources to achieve this.
A community will fall apart from the inside out if its members feel their needs are no longer being met. And, as one participant noted, “If there is no community, there is no resilience”. As such, plans for the future that illustrate how a community intends to serve each constituent part, and connect communities both internally and externally can be invaluable for enhancing community resilience.
In order to achieve this, communities must have access to resources. Without the ability to meet its basic needs, a community will cease to exist. Accordingly, it is prerequisite for resilience that communities have adequate physical resources, such as food, water, housing, heating, and other infrastructure. Non-physical resources, including education, female empowerment, and anti-corruption training, strategies, and enforcement, also foster resilience.
Ensure community voices are heard
which indicators or metrics ought to be included enable better policy recommendations in the future by enabling us to assess whether certain unproven policies in fact enhance resilience, and if so, to what degree and in what time frame.
Practitioners, policy makers and academics must allow for locals to speak for themselves to decolonise resilience work, and generate ideas for improving resilience from communities themselves.
Communities could also be taught about the policy making process and empower them to influence decision makers.
THEME 1
Tackling regional challenges to sustainable governance
Policy recommendations for new institutions grounded firmly in empathetic leadership and bottom-up decision making rather than top-down decision making.
Ensure regional institutional arrangements are ‘regionalisation for regionalisation’s sake’.
problem-oriented resilience affect problem perceptions and available solutions, possibly
Evaluate whether and how regional resilience initiatives are/can be inter-compatible – how can national communities be integrated with
Evaluate whether and how regional perspectives on resilience integrate with global perspectives, given tendency of regional to lean towards ‘strategic autonomy’ and create competing international powers/orders.
Regional level resilience occupies this unique and the global, possibly forming a ‘bridge’.
THEME 2
Embedding resilience in global governance institutions
We need to reconcile diversity
Contemporary geopolitical and cultural divisions are incompatible with the concept of resilience, and it is challenging to scale a consistent definition of resilience to fit global contexts.
We need more internationally balanced governance structures
There are imbalances between international powers that lead to the minimising of certain voices, particularly from the Global South.
We need more inclusive governance structures
We need more responsive, goal-orientated institutions
Existing global governance actors need to be substantially opened up – made more transparent, accessible, and diverse – in order for a more resilient global paradigm of governance to be established. The example of citizens’ assemblies possibly offers a pathway for such inclusion. This research has been supported by GCRF GNCA UKRI: https://www.ukri.org/news/additional-funding-boost-for-gcrf-and-newton-projects/
Current regional and global institutions may have initially been formed to address a given set or category of challenges best addressed beyond the local and national level. This can lead to reinforcing the resilience of the institution itself, as opposed to promoting long-term solutions to these challenges
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THEME 3
