Posted by Steve Waddell in Blog, M&E, Net Dev on March 13, 2012

Most multi-stakeholder networks are taking on pretty daunting challenges: climate change, corruption, sustainability, health, water, food security… What is critical to their success? A new perspective on this, accompanied by a very simply administered test, is offered with the concept …

UN Global Compact: a Global Action Network Case Study

Posted by Steve Waddell in Net Dev on January 25, 2012

UN Global Compact Executive Head Georg Kell became frustrated with the lack of understanding about how the Compact differs from government agencies. It leads to wrong-thinking about how it should be “run” and what it can and cannot do. He …

Sustainability Networks for Stability, Durability, Resilience and Robustness

Posted by Steve Waddell in Change, Net Dev on January 12, 2012

Lack of sustainability is, to a significant degree, the product of governance – our decision-making processes and structures favor non-sustainable outcomes. What does “sustainability governance” look like? The book Dynamic Sustainabilities (DS) has expanded my thinking about this.

The authors …

Connecting Physical and Social Science to Address Complexity

Posted by Steve Waddell in Change, Net Dev on January 4, 2012

While working with Ashoka to scale transformational change, I recently met a most remarkable man with a most remarkable insight. Allan Savory is associated with environmental land management; his most remarkable insight is to integrate a physical science observation with …

Death and Rise of Global Action Networks

Posted by Steve Waddell in Net Dev on December 15, 2011

The Kimberley Process (KP) is falling apart. And at the same time, new efforts are rising to create global multi-stakeholder change networks to end the trade of blood diamonds. A clear lesson of the demise is that “trust” is …