CHAPTER FIVE
How Donors Can Nurture Collaboration Let me ask it straight. What are some of the more liberating donor approaches that can understand and meet the complexities of collaboration?
A well posed question, Sani. I would like to add that it is not just about donors but about everyone seeing resourcing in a different way.
Peering into the resourcing paradigms of business, government and civil society Businesses are owned, financed and managed in ways that suit their needs, including their investment approaches, their risk management strategies and core work processes. Their products and services are visible and countable. Measuring the impact of funding or investments, as profit margins, is straightforward. To some extent the same is true for many government agencies and programmes. Infrastructure and basic services like health, education, social security etc., are mostly visible and measurable and the funding and financing of their work processes, serving a fixed and known “market”, may be complicated but is not complex.
It is true that many civil society organisations undertake funded service delivery projects, operating effectively as non-profit businesses rather than agents of social change and perhaps the impact of their work can be more easily gauged. But those who tackle human rights violations, including the social, economic, political and cultural transformation have highly complex practices tackling multifaceted issues, requiring a different paradigm of resourcing that takes account of this. Even within civil society there is a diversity that requires nuanced resourcing, for example between formal and informal organisational forms or between long-term capacity development programmes or shorter-term campaigns. And then the collaborative work of networks, coalitions and platforms adds yet another layer of complexity to the kind of resourcing support needed. But only a few donors understand or are able to provide this.
The donors of civil society, whose leaders and staff often have government or business backgrounds, too often treat civil society organisations as nonprofit businesses or bureaucratic projects. The way they fund the work of CSOs often misses the complexity, the unpredictability and long-term nature of social change work. They love to talk about “measuring impact” as if it were a simple matter of counting. Albert Einstein had this say: “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”
Chapter 5: How Donors Can Nurture Collaboration
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