ODA Empowering Local Decisionmakers and Sustainable System Strengthening

Strengthening systems that can deliver development for their people is not an aspect or an addition to previous paradigms of assistance, but a replacement. Situating ODA so that it empowers local decision-makers requires understanding who those actors are and what sorts of support are valuable to their efforts over time. The challenge will require a serious examination of the gap between the stated policy on local ownership and the unintended institutional outcome of FCDO’s engagement model, including in countries where the UK has long standing diplomatic partnership and interests.

UK ODA should move beyond project delivery to strategically contributing to  systemic resilience: investing in the soft infrastructure that enables partners to effectively engage, adapt, and lead across all governance levels, addressing transnational threats and bilateral interests while empowering local actors to drive their own core development outcomes.[1] That shift requires new portfolio logic, new accountability practices, and explicit investment in the people and routines—“weavers” and “navigators”—who translate between donor logics and local systems under uncertainty, making funding go further.[2] The processes and accountability for ODA can then flow from clearer understandings that better distinguish the value of an external contribution from the shared systemic change objective.

Effective development work requires making programming relevant to larger change processes. The revamped OECD criteria reflect this reality by introducing criteria like coherence and focusing on creating conditions for sustainability.[3] This signals a necessary shift away from solely judging interventions based on short-term, directly attributable observables. This is critical because funding short-term "best value for money" often overlooks the value of the UK and ODA's medium and long term investments.  Reinforcing meaningful ties between specific UK partners and those abroad, rather than doing work on their behalf and reporting it to them, both validates investments more authentically and strengthens attachment to collective global action when and where it proves effective.

Reckoning with Top Down Approaches

Top down approaches persist not because people prefer it, but because systems select for it.[4] When visibility, speed, and controllability dominate incentives, donors default to projectized delivery with pre-specified outputs, even when those outputs are weak proxies for systemic change. Three structural pulls matter:

●       Measurement gravity: Metrics traditionally required for FCDO reporting  privilege short-term activities over cumulative relational capacity. They incentivize FCDO staff to fly blind rather than use fit-for-purpose evidence to inform decision-making.

●       Sequential amnesia: Staff turnover, short postings, and episodic funding erase institutional memory, forcing costly perpetual restarts rather than enabling FCDO to do more with less.

●       Blame avoidance: Compliance architectures minimize reputational risk by narrowing discretion, even when that undermines contextual judgment and adaptation.

The merger that created FCDO compounds these tensions by integrating diplomacy, development, and security horizons in one institution. Multiple accountabilities and media scrutiny can tilt choices toward visible delivery and away from the less visible work of convening, brokering, and memory-keeping that sustains systems.

A partnership posture must therefore start with a different definition of success: not “we delivered X,” but “we increased the probability that local systems deliver for their people.” That requires judging UK contributions by how they strengthen relational capacity, authorization, and learning—not by whether they can claim attribution. Efforts to incentivize pre-defined results can generate unintended consequences, limiting space for innovation and risk-taking; for example, FCDO reviews of work in Nigeria found that payment by results had limited the scope for thinking and working politically, with an effective program achieving important outcomes despite contrary incentives.[5]

Partnership-Driven Portfolios

Moving beyond a top-down paradigm neatly escapes most of the challenges in local leadership. ODA to “deliver aid” but “allow local decision making” simply cannot work.

UK ODA should fund partnership-driven portfolios built around mutual interests and soft infrastructure that translates between donor requirements and local problem-solving. Partnership-driven portfolios are not a moral plea but a risk-management upgrade. They make portfolios reliable under uncertainty by detecting early signals of drift, enabling mid-course correction, and preserving institutional memory across staff turnover.

●       Portfolio over Project: Organize around thematic portfolios with domestic and global relevance (e.g., climate adaptation; energy and water resilience; AI and public procurement; public order and safety; inclusive markets). This surfaces mutual interest and stakeholders, putting partnerships on a stronger footing from the outset as enabling joint discovery with domestic learning payoffs rather than as charity.

●       Learning Exchange: Treat each portfolio as an adaptive laboratory deployed across multiple geographies, with nested questions and cross-case syntheses. In this frame, country projects become sites of inquiry, not isolated contracts to deliver specified goods.

●       Soft infrastructure: Invest in the connective layer that turns dispersed local learning into portfolio-level intelligence. This includes specific reflection routines (mid-course reviews, learning briefs, after-action sense-making) that interrogate assumptions and rebalance strategy, and supporting convening platforms (peer exchanges, safe-space cross-portfolio forums) that surface, test, and circulate insight.

●       Accountability for forward progress: Use learning briefs rather than rigid scorecards as the primary currency of accountability at portfolio level. Accountability must center on informing future investment decisions and portfolio-wide approaches, around the sense that the learning is worthwhile for all partners.

●       Attend to sustainability and spillovers: Fund ex-post and portfolio evaluations that explicitly incentivize and enable learning and accountability about coherence, value for investment, and sustainability over time, particularly in places where the UK has long-term engagement and strategic interests. Capture broader sets of contributions to areas beyond specified development aims, to better understand how and when ODA contributes to strategic relationships and outcomes.

●       Invisible weavers: Key local boundary-spanners convene, route, translate, and steward memory across civic, bureaucratic, and market actors. Fund their function explicitly through approaches such as micro-grants for coordination time; flexible network budgets; recognition and mobility pathways for them relative to FCDO footprint and institutional presence, etc.

●       Donor navigators: Since the merger that created FCDO, it contains multiple stakeholders who will have different time horizons across development, diplomacy, and defense priorities, with different ways of perceiving the value add of investments. Stakeholders moving between these perspectives (as UK and foreign national staff and partners) can hold different sight lines over time and are important reference points for portfolio definition and management.

Challenges in Shifting from Top-Down, or What Not To Do

1. Don't chase objectivity without judgment. Avoid rigid “objective” benchmarks that crowd out context. Use judgment-rich, evidence-informed processes: tonal/relational indicators (density, continuity, responsiveness of key relationships) alongside conventional metrics. Involve stakeholders in asserting and confirming tangible value.
2. Don’t enable stringing along. Define structured terms of investment with a specific timeline not subject to change. Use time-bound, binding tranches with transparent exit/renewal logic so UK contributions are seen as additive, not as a backstop for routine service delivery. Focus on what FCDO contributes and the value of those contributions, properly understood.
3. Don’t valorize form over function. Partner selection should privilege connective credibility and persistence, not just organizational brand or contracting capacity. Fund weaver roles (coordination, translation, memory-keeping), not only activities. Consider the presence of key actors with the persistence to continue leading in a space, in addition to high-level political will and elite bargains, in selecting areas for partnership that are likely to sustain gains.
4. Don’t outsource engagement. Tie specific projects to time horizons across a number of stakeholders. Ensure that short-term engagements orchestrated by foreign service staff, traditionally tied to contractors with short-term targets, are instead aligned with longer-term change strategies owned more robustly by country stakeholders. Short-term implementers should be embedded in longer-term country strategies owned by domestic stakeholders. Align incentives to mutual value generation, not predetermined output tallies.
5. Don’t seek attribution. Center contribution to others’ long-term work. Ask: what did UK support make more likely—and how do we know? Build accountability around learning that informs future choices, not retrospective box-ticking. Keep as a north star that the point is to make a meaningful contribution to someone else’s long-term work to strengthen systems and drive results, with learning and accountability centered on the contribution being valuable.
6. Don’t underinvest in connective infrastructure. Reflection, narrative, convening, and network stewardship are not “overhead.” They are the infrastructure of system intelligence. Budget for them.

Implementing the Shift: Practical Institutional Moves

Within FCDO

●       Create protected pilots: stand up 2–3 portfolios (e.g., climate resilience; AI/procurement) authorized to use learning briefs, relational indicators, and adaptive tranche decisions. Give them explicit political cover and publish what’s learned.

●       Conduct a review to learn from country level portfolios already innovating in this direction[6] - whether through thinking and working politically, adaptive management, or systems approaches - and scale what is effective.

●       Formalize navigator roles and credit. Build “navigation” into job descriptions, rotations, and performance reviews (criteria: quality of partner judgment, integrity of sense-making, portability of learning).

●       Undertake procurement tweaks that enable cooperation. Make collaboration cost-eligible (coordination time, peer convenings, synthesis). Allow small, rapid micro-awards for weaver functions without resetting the whole contract.

●       Nurture institutional memory buffers. Require handover notes, learning briefs, and partner-validated summaries at each posting transition; fund continuity fellowships that keep relational memory alive across cycles.

Across the UK ecosystem

●       Equip UK partners to be proximity gap closers - rather than top-down technical experts for local contexts.[7] Task UK universities/INGOs/Think Tanks to synthesize cross-country insight for FCDO decision needs (short memos, not long reports). Reward usefulness and timeliness.

●       Co-fund connective platforms with philanthropy. Pool small grants for peer networks and narrative frameworks; philanthropy’s flexibility can extend the life of weaver capacity between public cycles.

●       Align on shared questions. Publish a small set of portfolio learning questions annually; develop nested theories of change and results frameworks; invite grantees to respond from their context; synthesize laterally and upward.

For Parliament and taxpayers

●       Reframe accountability as portfolio reliability under uncertainty: can the portfolio detect, interpret, and respond to change credibly and quickly? Report on reliability indicators (e.g., time from signal to course-correction; partner-rated usefulness of learning; continuity of key relationships) and domestic value of learning (building on learning questions alongside UK stakeholders) in addition to appropriate conventional results.