Buckle up. It’s a bumpy ride ahead. Imagine hopping on a chicken bus, where the destination is set; yet, we don’t know the schedule, the route, what repairs the vehicle needs, the experience of the driver, who we’ll meet along the way, or if we’ll even have a place to sit. One would be right to feel afraid, but, instead, we can use this enhanced alertness to learn from how most people solve their need to mobilize. That’s somewhat how the story of a fast loop around our first learning cycle felt like.

Before we begin, let’s back up in time a bit. Maybe our destination was not quite set either. At least not everyone had the same thing in mind. It’s as if we had told the chicken bus driver: “takes us to the most beautiful site in the northern region of Guatemala”. Right, it’s not any place, just one with a wide range of interpretations. And the greater the diversity of the people involved, the broader the range of possibilities. Such an open journey gives us the opportunity to discover a rich variety of places, as long as we can recognize the value of each alternative. However, it also gives us the risk of failing to coordinate, ending up alone or in an “ugly” place.

So, the starting point of our learning journey was a complex development challenge. We headed out wanting to improve the collaboration between society and public institutions that seeks to increase resilience to climate change. For example, the type of collaboration that is hoped to happen during recovery from floods, droughts, increasingly scarce drinking water, or new pollution-reducing policies. This challenge captured what was considered the central development problem of Guatemala, according to participants in the brainstorming workshops we ran with public officials and UNDP teams.

Getting to the departing point was not a trivial feat to begin with. And once there, our “engine” stalled. It was difficult to decide as a team which route the Accelerator Lab should take to address the challenge it set to itself. We were strangers, who met online, with different experiences, skills, styles, and perspectives. It was tricky to harmonize approaches that prioritized broad participation, reproducible processes, and institutional strengthening. Also, there was a tension between defining the purpose of the journey first or finding such purpose on the way.

During this standstill, we took a walk through a “scenic route”. We organized additional workshops with UNDP programmatic teams to better understand the causes of our challenge and the alternative questions we could help answer. It happened that the possibilities seemed endless. Collaboration between society and public institutions that seeks to increase resilience to climate change was perceived to be related to multiple factors such as institutional strength, norms, coordination, resources, geography, structural conditions of vulnerability, social practices, among many others. Moreover, this stroll, required moving at the pace of projects that need to wait on public institution approvals.

The “scenic route” undoubtedly gave us a deeper understanding of our challenge. Its greatest value might be the clarity we gained about the work carried out within the UNDP office and the relations we forged with its teams. However, it was time for us to move from reflection to action.

What followed, one might say, was like jumping on the back of a pick-up truck. Another dangerous move. We realized that making strides towards our original destination was going to take more time than anticipated. Nevertheless, on our way there, we had the opportunity to improve our “navigation skills”. Therefore, we organized activities for learning how to implement a learning cycle.

The idea was trying out a simplified version of the learning cycle. We picked one of the questions proposed in the workshops with the country office: what are the barriers for public institutions to collaborate with society in the implementation of plans to increase resilience to climate change? Although complex, this question was not contentious within the team. Then, we organized sensing, exploring, and experimenting exercises guided by this question. These exercises, planned to last no more than four hours each, would allow us to get comfortable with the different methodologies, work as a team, as well as gain insights about the question.

Of course, circumstances weren’t entirely under our control. A massive “speed bump” on the road derailed us temporarily: balancing between moving forward with our action plan, ad-hoc requests and other responsibilities. However, we did manage to steer a few of these additional activities towards our question. For example, we linked a workshop about corruption with its effects on climate change and used the invitation to facilitate an innovation exercise to ideate ways for managing knowledge about sustainable development.

At last, we got moving. And we got dazzled. Especially during the sensing exercise. We visited the surroundings of Guatemala City’s landfill and learned about ways in which people create value from waste, skills workers have developed, and opportunities for addressing unmet needs. The 360-video bellow gives a peek of the sight. For the exploring exercise, we identified different sources of information and their potential use, including the untapped value of proposals from university dissertations. As for the experimentation exercise, we generated a set of hypotheses regarding the effect of transparency, resources, and dialogue measures on cooperation.

360-video of visit to the surroundings of Guatemala City’s landfill

Now we can’t wait to go back. Although brief and simplified, this learning cycle revealed to us a complex system around solid waste management, which involves a variety of processes including the production, collection, transport, separation, reuse, final disposal, and the impact on ecosystems of waste. Also, it helped us work better together. Nonetheless, we still fill empty handed. We’re missing a tested and innovative solution that can positively impact development. Therefore, we will be heading back, this time along with Guatemala City’s municipality, as well as the poverty reduction and environment programs of the UNDP office, in order to identify opportunities to promote good practices of solid waste management.

Thank you for enduring with us through the tale of this clumsy ride. Without a doubt, the openness to work with our Accelerator Lab and the support we have received from the UNDP country teams, the Accelerator Lab global network, public officials, and other counterparts has been crucial to overcoming any emerging difficulties. Also, we hope that the chicken bus metaphor was a useful devise to speak with more confidence about the less comfortable features that are intrinsic to the journey towards sustainable development.

Blog written by:

Javier Brolo
Head of Experimentation