From community consultations to deep listening

Community consultations are part and parcel of all of UNDP’s programming. In the stabilization interventions, consultations are conducted to inform the district Joint Action Plans, which outline the priorities to be addressed. However, beyond these consultations, more can be done to put people at the centre of the interventions and ensure accountability to the communities we serve.

In a crisis context, where needs and conditions are fluid and can shift on a monthly, sometimes daily basis, we need to continuously have our finger on the pulse to learn what the communities are feeling and be sensitive to new or previously undiscovered dynamics in the communities. We need to regularly assess and understand perceptions, barriers, challenges and opportunities relating to issues such as returns of IDP to their places of origin and the provision of basic services to sustain their return.

We must have direct lines of contact with affected communities and work with them to create new portfolio options that are fit to address changing needs. Against this backdrop, we asked ourselves if a traditional community listening process would be sufficient - or whether we need to challenge ourselves in the way in which we could learn more about community needs.

A traditional approach to community listening during project implementation consists of informally collecting feedback from communities on interventions and using this information for day-to-day decision-making about the interventions, to identify gaps and challenges that need to be immediately addressed for activities to be sustainable and impactful. This type of traditional listening process, however, has three limitations:

1. It does not feature any systematic recording of communities’ feedback in forms that allow us to analyze this feedback over time. As such, with staff turnover, valuable insights risk getting lost.
2. Relatedly, because communities’ views are not recorded in formats that allow systematic analysis, feedback from communities would typically inform short-term adaptation of activities, but not strategic decision-making later down the line.
3. Traditional community consultations record communities’ explicit views about interventions but do not dive deeper into how communities perceive the challenges they are confronting.

So how can UNDP better keep a finger on the pulse of what is happening on the ground?

To explore this further, UNDP partnered with the Agirre Lehendakaria Center (ALC). Working with UNDP Country Offices across the world - such as Thailand, Indonesia, and Uruguay - UNDP and ALC have been coordinating and implementing bottom-up listening processes, system mapping and sensemaking to inform portfolios of interconnected interventions designed to continuously generate a supply of options, supporting the delivery of strategic development impact and system transformation.

This brings UNDP closer to affected communities and reinforces their agency in the design and implementation of activities. The deep listening not only connects UNDP with real-time community feedback but also allows UNDP to consider hidden perceptions and underlying convictions among the local population and project stakeholders – assumptions that all too often are not considered in project design but are crucial for projects’ success.

Moreover, the deep listening process integrates tailored tools for storing and systematically analyzing data from the community listening. This capacity, enriched by systems mapping and ongoing opportunities for sensemaking, allows us to keep our finger on the pulse of what is happening to generate new options for our interventions.

Building on UNDP’s lessons learnt and experience working with deep listening globally, we started integrating the methodology of deep listening in our stabilization interventions and broader engagement in northern Mozambique in September 2022. In the following months, the first round of ‘deep listening’ data was collected. We are now analyzing the data, and through the various listening channels, we are starting to delve into the complex system of actors and interactions impacting ongoing violence in Cabo Delgado and the related impacts on the civilian population.

One key finding is that the affected people are not uniform in their perceptions of their willingness to return to conflict-affected areas. There are those who have a very strong attachment to their land and are willing to return to their areas of origin even if these places are not perceived as safe. Others would only like to return if they have their houses reconstructed or access better socio-economic opportunities, whereas still others (often younger people with more education) do not wish to return because they see their future in other areas of the country or abroad.

This shows how perceptions and preferences regarding development options are not uniform – development policies and interventions must recognize this and adapt to the diverse preferences and perceptions of different segments of society.

We are already seeing how a systemic, ‘deep-listening’ approach is enabling us to build an understanding of the collective narratives and different ways of interpreting reality that are operating in the region, collecting patterns of people’s lived experiences and how these are shaped by underlying values and behaviors, as well as emerging needs, challenges, and opportunities.

With time, this understanding has the potential to increasingly enable the interconnection of UNDP and other initiatives and stakeholders, and to improve government decision-making so that their initiatives connect within co-created portfolios that address systemic challenges and align with citizens' perceptions and lived experiences. In parallel to this, this systemic approach will enhance our capability to learn about what is going on within the communities where we are working and reflect this back to the design of policy options and development interventions.