Let us first consider the evidence for the assertion that collaboration can make funders more effective. Again, there are two aspects to this. The first concerns situations where collaboration among funders cannot be said to have led to greater efficacy, but rather where it has led to something which would not have happened at all without the collaboration.
assistance takes place, making a distinction between sustainability on three levels. One commentator summarised them thus: “You can have sustainability of a project (including obviously the organisational structures that support it); you can have sustainability of the capacity to undertake similar projects (which may mean the original structures and process might disappear, be absorbed elsewhere etc), and you can have sustainability of the idea that informed and underpinned a project.”
For example, in the case of the FCFC, the funders would have been extremely unlikely to have embarked on such a project on their own. They had to accept that results may not materialise at all, or at least not for a long time, and that indeed results would not be easily measureable. The latter is an implicit acceptance of something else – a notion which some funders ignore, or would dispute, namely that not all types of success are measurable. Andrew Natsios, former director of the U.S. Agency for International Development, summed this up when he said: “Those development programmes that are most precisely and easily measured are the least transformational and those programmes that are most transformational are the least measurable.”87 This will have been eminently true for FCFC if the pilot is successful and leads to widespread replication of the model, as merely counting the measurable success (i.e. the number of children reached) will only tell a limited part of the story.
In the case of FCFC, whatever happens to the funding after 2012, it is perfectly plausible that the second and/or the third of these types of sustainability could prevail. The point here, in relation to collaboration, is this. All the funders involved in FCFC or similar collaborative initiatives who we talked to, have indicated that venturing into the realm of this type of innovative investment is only feasible if the risk and resource burden is shared with a number of other funders. So it is clear that this factor alone means that without collaboration, potentially transformative projects like this would often never get off the ground in the first place. And there are other collaborations, driven not so much by the need to share risk and management responsibility as the wish to create a financial capacity, through pooled funding, which would simply not exist otherwise.
An important related notion is the sustainability of any capacity development, which can be seen as an important aspect of success. A recent evaluation by The Policy and Operations Evaluation Department of the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs sparked an internet discussion on the Platform for Evidence-based Learning & Communication for Social Change.88 It included an interpretation of sustainability, commensurate with the complex and fast-moving environment, with multiple actors and unforeseen events, in which development
Secondly, what about situations where it would have been conceivable or indeed where it was actually the case that funders attempted to achieve something by working singly and where a collaborative effort has then been undertaken? Perhaps a good example is the Corston Coalition’s work. There were a number of funders working on the issues covered by the Corston Report. Baroness Corston’s findings and recommendations presented an opportunity to funders and NGOs in the sector to apply pressure to politicians in the pursuit of policy and practice
87 Cited by Steve Tibbet, 14 Feb 2011, in ‘Don’t let the Bean Counters Get You Down’ – www.devex.com 88 http://www.dgroups.org/groups/pelican/
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