Innovation in Governance - Integrating Technical and Contextual Perspectives to Address Fragility

This brief is the first of two and focuses on how using process innovations can improve decision-making within complex and fragile environments in Ethiopia, Kenya, Mali, Niger and Somalia.

Building resilience among pastoralists and agro-pastoralists in drylands requires addressing systemic challenges within complex and often fragile political systems. Navigating complexity requires decision-makers to integrate two types of knowledge: technical, or generalisable expert and scientific knowledge; and contextual, concerning local political economy, society and ecology.

Practitioners and decision-makers generally agree that policy and programme decisions should be based on both of these sources of knowledge, especially in complex and fragile environments. However, little attention has been paid to how this integration can lead to improved decision-making that is technically sound, appropriate to local context and perceived as legitimate.

This research brief centres on a specific decision-making framework, the Stakeholder Approach to Risk Informed and Evidence Based Decision Making (SHARED). SHARED aims to develop the participation of stakeholders by embedding technical and evidence-driven decision-making within an understanding of local social, political and ecological systems. This approach has been used in complex and fragile contexts across Africa since 2014, and is formulated with special attention to complex problems, with policy applications from local to national level. 

The SHARED approach seeks to integrate innovative – and evidence-based – approaches into complex and fragile political contexts. Looking across the framework's applications in five sub-Saharan drylands contexts in Ethiopia, Kenya, Mali, Niger and Somalia, key messages from this paper include: adapting practices based on ‘evidence’ and ‘data’; synthesising technical information within the complexity of the specific context; applying a common multi-stakeholder engagement framework (the SHARED approach); applying process innovations can help facilitate inclusive decision-making processes which integrate both technical and contextual knowledge, etc.

This research is part of a body of work on the role of innovation in supporting resilience in drylands. If you are you working on innovative solutions designed with and for pastoralists and agro-pastoralists in drylands, we would value your contribution to SPARC’s innovation dashboard. See the SPARC website for more details.