Systems Change for the Commons

(Photo courtesy of Foundation for Ecological Security)

“What do we see at the village level?” asked Jagveer Singh, of GVMNL, an NGO in Rajasthan, in India. “Encroachment is increasing, and regulatory authorities aren’t doing much. People tell us their livelihoods depend on the land. Their elected representatives refuse to act because they feel they will lose votes. Everyone tells us that if there’s a way to establish a united front, in which people are aware of their rights to natural resources, then a path forward is possible.”

But how to find that path forward? Jagveer was relaying his insights to colleagues and members of Collaborating for Resilience (CoRe) and the Foundation for Ecological Security (FES) at a virtual workshop in July 2021. The challenge they face is considerable. Around 350 million of India’s rural poor rely on “the Commons” for their livelihoods, the roughly 205 million acres of community forests, pasturelands, and water bodies that provide food, fodder, medicine, firewood, and timber. However, due to encroachment and neglect, India’s rural poor are fast losing control over these common lands, a problem exacerbated by the lack of protection for common pool resources, centralized governance practices, competing interests, and state governments’ tendency to view the Commons as “wastelands” that offer nothing of value to India’s modernizing economy.

When thinking about how to scale efforts to improve environmental governance and make India’s rural livelihood systems more sustainable and resilient, practitioners often focus on creative solutions or technical fixes. Yet as Jeffery C. Walker has put it, “[having] a great idea for solving a social problem is just the beginning. You also need to identify the collaborators who can help translate your innovations into real solutions for the real world.” An analysis focused on “systems change,” by contrast, not only teases out the contours of the wider social and political ecosystem in which a problem persists, but also works to develop a shared understanding between a network of actors, leverage unique resources, build a knowledge base, and come at complex problems from multiple angles. To go beyond easy solutions, systems thinking asks questions about scale and complexity: What approaches can help achieve collective impact in situations where the complexity of barriers to change requires coordinated actors across multiple scales? And how can the principles of a political economy analysis help untangle this complexity to yield practical pathways to change?

Systems Change From the Ground Up

Equipping local actors with the tools to answer these questions themselves is a crucial first step in the path forward. Local actors need to conduct their own analyses. For decades, agencies like USAID have emphasized political inclusion, accountability, and participatory governance, lessons from experts that highlight technocratic approaches to systemic problems like institutional weakness and political corruption. But such fine-grained evaluations don’t have to be carried out by experts alone, nor should solutions be implemented in a top-down fashion. Practitioners, civil society organizations, and local communities all have unique perspectives on the problems they face because they deal with them every day. 

For this reason, FES’s approach to restoring and protecting the ecological integrity of common lands has always been focused on helping local communities successfully manage their resources in ways that build livelihood security for even the most poor and marginalized. But if systems change must begin from the ground up, including local actors is just a start. We found that even as we made progress at the village level, FES continued to face barriers at a larger scale: unfavorable national policies, broader institutional norms, and big-picture political incentive structures. We learned that we needed to bring more actors in the mix.

In Rajasthan, for example, an arid state in India’s northwest known for its rugged pastoralists, FES had long been working to build partnerships between organizations working on livestock health and productivity. When the problem was defined around livestock itself, the discussions were restricted to technical solutions such as livestock vaccination and fodder management. But the systemic social and political barriers to change stemmed from the actions (or lack thereof) of specific actors: government ministries, state and district-level officers, private mining companies, the state legislative assembly, and even the media. FES, therefore, began outreach to members of the state legislative assembly and other officials at the state level: in 2009, for example, this included field visits for the state’s minister of rural development. Such visits not only demonstrated the overlap between the ministry’s goals and the need to conserve the Commons—helping to overcome a tendency to view the latter as “wastelands”—but led to joint policies combining conservation needs with evolving state-level priorities, such as annual joint campaigns with the Government of Rajasthan to improve awareness about restoration and collective management of the Commons. Scaling these local initiatives led to an integration between the Government of Rajasthan’s agenda and the Commons initiative, most notably in 2019 through expanding both restoration efforts and rural employment by leveraging the existing National Rural Employment Guarantee Act.

CoRe and FES have been working together to build a systematic approach to strengthening multi-actor platforms (MAPs) at landscape scale since 2014, building upon experiences like those in Rajasthan. These platforms function as spaces where different stakeholders – including government agencies, private sector actors, local communities, and civil society representatives – convene to discuss and address shared governance challenges. In short, they aim to promote co-learning and co-creation.  Initially focused on governance innovation at the level of the sub-district or “block” as they are known in rural India, we’ve learned that tackling a large-scale, complex challenge like Commons restoration requires work at multiple levels simultaneously, connecting local initiatives to actors at the district, sub-national, and national levels. The challenge we face now is how to make this progress more intentional to scale impact.

Getting Practical With the Political Economy Lens

In 2020, the Promise of Commons initiative was selected among a handful of finalists by Co-Impact for a nine-month Design Grant to raise ambition and mobilize for systems change. The initiative is an ongoing attempt to help village communities secure rights to and collectively manage 30 million acres of land, leading to more inclusive environmental governance and improved economic outcomes for 38 million people. Critically it depends upon crafting “winning coalitions”—networks of diverse NGOs, champions in government, women’s rights activists, researchers, and others who work at multiple levels—to identify and address systemic barriers to improve governance of India’s shared natural resources. Our goal is to use these experiences to distill broader lessons on how to build sustained networks of practitioners and social entrepreneurs pursuing lasting, systems-level change in matters of environmental governance, moving up from local to sub-national and national levels. 

CoRe helped FES teams develop a program to analyze the institutional and power dynamics in two resource systems—forests in Odisha and pasturelands in Rajasthan, where some success had been achieved in restoring the Commons—to explore possibilities for improved governance at greater scales. In Odisha, we found that legislative and bureaucratic complexity, marginalization of women and tribal groups, and a lack of bureaucratic alignment limited inclusive and effective resource governance. In Rajasthan, we learned that supportive policies and programs for pastureland governance often failed to reach the subdistrict level due to a lack of convergence between community priorities and government action.

In both cases, we saw four general barriers to systems-level change:

1. A lack of collaboration between state, local, and village level actors left problem solvers fragmented in their ability to solve problems through collective action.
2. Weak planning and capacity led to half-hearted or poor implementation of otherwise useful solutions.
3. Limited support from public authorities and misplaced policy goals created a mindset which viewed the Commons as wastelands and diverted investment.
4. A lack of accountability and compliance rendered existing legislation in support of protecting and restoring the Commons toothless.

Because these obstacles applied far beyond Odisha and Rajasthan, developing better governance for the Commons was more than just identifying local solutions: it was also a matter of recognizing and addressing the social, political, and economic roadblocks which made it difficult to implement creative solutions and hence advance collective resource governance. A systems-level approach needs to identify the full range of actors, interests, and organizations relevant to a particular resource governance challenge. Who are the doers within each system? Who are the enablers and power brokers at various levels? And how do we develop a defined framework that helps engage those with potential influence to shift the system in favor of the poorest resource users who are typically marginalized? 

Answers to some of these queries required scaling our thinking, but since the initiatives explicitly designed to promote inclusivity and dialogue, they were ideally situated to engage additional stakeholders. Our analysis only reinforced that making progress on governance challenges at scale required building networks that actively incorporated both stakeholders working to advance solutions as well as stakeholders involved in perpetuating the power dynamics, economic incentives, and institutional barriers to change. No single actor has the power to revamp a system of competing interests, perspectives, and goals, and excluding important actors, regardless of the role they play, will leave underlying issues of power imbalances and skewed economic incentives unchanged.

Developing Guidance for Field Teams

Building on these insights, we held a series of workshops in July and August 2021 to develop guidance for field teams conducting “systems change analysis.” However, rather than brainstorm specific solutions, the workshops emphasized implementing a framework that could deliver system-level changes, within the particular constraints of participants’ state contexts. In early sessions, for instance, participants working on state-specific problems were encouraged not to think about fixes but were asked to describe the purpose and context of their goals, identify the range of actors involved and their patterns of influence, and distill key barriers and opportunities for improved resource governance. Only when participants had a solid understanding of how multiple actors could work to together to make progress at a broader scale did the workshops encourage them to think about concrete ways to move forward by asking questions like: What is the problem and its root causes? What is our desired system and how can we reach it? Who do we need to engage and how?

Held in three rounds, the workshops worked sequentially through CoRe’s three phases to collaborative problem solving: listening, dialogue, and choice.

Listening Phase: What Is the Purpose? What Are the possibilities? What Are the Realities?

Step 1: Identify the purpose and context for systems change. Participants develop a shared overarching purpose, including the core problem they wish to address, its causes, consequences, and broader resource system context.

Step 2: Analyze key actors in the system. Having developed a shared purpose, participants move on to mapping relationships among different stakeholders at different levels in their resource system. Stakeholders are placed on a dual axis, which distinguishes them based on the level of influence and support they have for systems change.

Dialogue Phase: What Are the Priorities for Change? Which Actors Will Support These Priorities, and Which Will Oppose Them?

Step 3: Summarize how change happens in the system. Building on their understanding of the resource system and its context, participants develop an understanding of how change occurs at multiple scales. Specifically, they identify the contributing outcomes, or changes in key actors’ behavior, that will help achieve their shared purpose.

Step 4: Distill barriers, pathways, and future possibilities for systems change. Having gained an understanding of how change happens, participants debate the concrete barriers – such as those emanating from specific institutions and actors – to achieving their desired outcomes and pathways to overcome them.

Choice Phase: What Will We Do? Will It Achieve Our Purpose?

Step 5: Plan actions to build winning coalitions to drive systems change. In the penultimate step, participants begin developing plans for action. Using their newfound knowledge of the system, participants begin defining real-life tasks and roles they need to play to achieve change, leaving them with a concrete point of departure to pursue systems change

Step 6: Evaluate what works and adapt to sustain collaboration and expand influence. As the outcomes from collaborative action become clear and new obstacles and opportunities emerge, teams revisit the five steps above to refine and update their understanding and adjust their strategy.

Systems change analysis is uniquely suited to a large-scale and complex challenge like revitalizing the Commons. The process of stakeholder mapping, for example, creates space for intentional action: by identifying the actors involved in a resource system, an obscure, even subconsciously understood system (replete with different incentive structures) is thrown into sharp relief. Once the system is grasped, partners can begin concretely identifying which actors need to change what behaviors and how. This analysis helps actors understand not only where the bottlenecks in a system are but also how to challenge entrenched power relations and institutional biases that typically maroon efforts to influence the system.

Of course, systems-level analysis comes with its own challenges. When would-be partners hold divergent organizational goals, they risk working at cross purposes. But the existence of discordant notes doesn’t preclude the possibility of alignment. The challenge is to emphasize the larger shared purpose rather than a narrow set of goals that apply only to a specific set of actors. If there is alignment, even between discordant actors, there is a way to achieve progress. In the state of Odisha, for example, coordinated outreach to state-level policy officials and district officers is planned, aiming to speed recognition of community forest rights, buttressed by efforts to make progress on this front a politically significant issue. In the state of Chhattisgarh, the action plan includes joint efforts to bring government decisions into the public domain to strengthen coordination among relevant departments and enhance their accountability. Plans from Andhra Pradesh include new efforts to reach out to Mining Department officials, recognizing the influence of this government agency on the Revenue Department and related development plans.

With clarity on the multiple, concrete barriers they face, as well as how to engage specific actors through well-planned actions, local NGOs are thus working to scale their initiatives and target systems-level outcomes with a speed and level of coordination that far outpaces earlier efforts. Currently, FES together with 91 NGO partners, is pursuing the goals of the Promise of Commons initiative in over 33,500 habitations reaching 18.6 million rural people. While that’s still a fraction of the 350 million rural people who depend on the Commons in India, the initiative is on a trajectory to reach a tipping point of change within the current decade.

Funding for this research was provided by the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM).

Read more stories by Usmaan Farooqui, Blake Ratner, Jagdeesh Rao, Rahul Chaturvedi & Pratiti Priyadarshini.