WORKING DIFFERENTLY
Breaking Convention
A TransDisciplinary Movement
Why Is This a Groundbreaking Endeavor?
A visionary group of award-winning practitioners joined together in a unique partnership to test and refine a truly big idea.
We believe it's one with breakthrough potential to bring transformative change to international conservation and development practice. We believe it calls implementers and funders to a new, higher standard of work. We believe it has the potential to improve today's prevailing models of global philanthropy.
And we believe that by having joined our names behind it, we can help positively inspire tomorrow's practitioners, funders and scholars.
What’s the 'Big Idea'?
There’s a pressing case for bringing bold change to conservation and development practice. For too long, stubborn pressures within and across our fields have slowed innovation, held us hostage to trendy but ineffective approaches, fueled stifling competition for resources, and most importantly, failed too often to produce world-class work.
We can change it!
By bravely calling out what isn't working. By rethinking what's possible. By holding ourselves accountable to a higher standard. And by moving beyond a fixation on field, brand and benefactor.
It's time to build a truly next-generation practice.
Can You Explain It Further?
Our appeal -- our call to action to implementers and funders alike -- is to close the gaps between the development and conservation fields. To work intentionally in ways that innovatively transcend them.
We have a collective obligation to work with a single purpose – to protect and preserve human and wild in balance, in all its forms, no matter our setting or scale, and in a manner and pace in keeping with the challenge.
Rather than work in echo chambers within our own fields amidst comfortable conventions, it's time to push into conversations and alliances that challenge and reinvent them. Rather than adhere to stale methodologies and metrics, it's time to think up and test approaches that demand fully balanced designs centering humanitarian, development and conservation outcomes equally. Not as the exception, but as the standard. It's time, in other words, to reshape our fields into a singularly impactful and enduring practice, to positively transform how we work and what we achieve.
Put even more simply, it's time to resist being labeled an "aid worker," a "development practitioner" or a "conservationist." Each of us in practice must be them all.
When we work stubbornly attached to our occupational labels, we're constrained by the traditions and conventions expected of us. Limited as a result in the scope of our work and our influence. And too often dissuaded from making the vital and urgent case, whether within our own organizations or with prospective funders, for work that unapologetically sits at that 'impact sweet spot' between conservation and development imperatives.
We believe that no matter our core discipline, we should be anchoring our work to a vision and a strategy that transcend field and brand -- that unite us in cause and accountability. And we strive to prove that it can be done responsibly and effectively.
What’s Missing in Our Practice Now?
While development practitioners and conservationists have flirted with modest partnerships across sectors and fields, and been laudably quick to celebrate work that 'integrates' objectives, our approach remains fundamentally cautious. We're tinkering at the margins of more innovative thinking. And too often we're producing unbalanced outcomes with devastating long-term costs.
Today’s interdisciplinary and 'integrated' models represent a cautious, limited and carefully scoped intersection of our interests and capacities. They speak of our "complementarity," our "linkages," and our "combined evidence base." They speak to "people-centered conservation" or "integrated development." But they leave each of our disciplines still at the center of their own respective working models, beholden to a stubborn binary paradigm keeping our fields, in most places and in most ways, working apart. So much more is possible, and so much more inventive is urgently needed.
Rather than see today’s interdisciplinary approach – and our allegiance to the 'integrated' models, 'integrated' programming and 'integrated' research rooted in it – as an inflection point in an evolutionary process for our fields, too many are celebrating it as the goal line, as evidence of optimal organizational sophistication and impact.
It’s at least possible that it’s neither, and that it represents instead an important step inviting a far more courageous and far more promising evolution.
It’s a deep convergence of disciplines that needs our discerning and accelerated attention if we're to meet our task and potential. More on this is available under the question category "But What About..." in the FAQs tab.
What Does This Kind of Change Promise and Risk?
A transdisciplinary movement represents an invitation to our fields to reshape our practice so that we are more than simply a collection of specialized organizations and practitioners. It's an invitation to revolutionize our perspectives and our approach, and one that shows exciting potential to accelerate our ability to lead and achieve change at greater scale, faster pace, and with far more enduring outcomes.
Opening a new frontier in our practice or any for that matter, particularly one that boldly dissolves walls between us, will never be without its controversy, but we can strive to inspire change, not conflict. We can seek to invigorate conversation, not settle debate.
For scholars, a transdisciplinary examination invites a more thoughtful and creative dialogue. For donors, it invites a refreshing opportunity to realign funding scope and vision. For organizations, it invites an inspiring and necessary challenge. For practitioners, it invites real and liberating discovery.
Why Launch A Practitioners Alliance?
For starters, it had never been done! Rather than the far more common convention of building alliances of organizations and brands, we wanted to build an alliance of individual change-makers. The partnership we built harnessed an extraordinary mix of voices, expertise, and reputation, leaders with vigorous curiosity, enterprising spirit, and an eagerness to inspire change and energize conversation within and across our fields. And with any new idea, our foremost task was to critically examine the impact a transdisciplinary approach had in practice, to document the change it produced, and to shape and refine its possible use going forward – a “Proof-of-Impact” to follow “Proof-of-Concept.”
We set ourselves to four primary goals:
1. To test the idea and document the change we saw in our teams and on the ground
2. To inspire the important conversation needed around the case for transdisciplinary practice by contributing experiential learning, reflection, and critique
3. To explore and propose promising ways for practitioners, funders and researchers to contribute to a transdisciplinary movement and expand its use in practice
4. To join our voices together and call for work that constructively and imaginatively challenges entrenched conventions prejudicing outcomes and stifling innovation
This was not a research effort. It was an action effort. And while we expected the work to interest a wide community, including funders and scholars, our target audience has always been the Practitioner, and its metric is positively transformative, recognizable ground impact.
What Fieldwork Was Done to Test the Idea?
We undertook fieldwork together in East Africa where the work of our Founding Practitioners formed a kind of testbed. We went under-the-hood to unpack and redesign select programs. And through the prism of that work, we looked together at areas where associated change to an organization's broader strategy, leadership, staffing or growth improved or accelerated outcomes. And in the process, we excited and energized field teams.
Where Can I Dig Deeper?
The ideas and work at the foundation of our own can be found in Elizabeth's groundbreaking call for transdisciplinarity in “A Practitioner’s Case for Working Differently."
It presents a vision that unites our fields behind a common strategy.
It makes a case for why bold change is needed for a more enduring impact, and may well be essential to the long-term viability of the conservation and development movements themselves.
It introduces an illustrative strategic framework that can be used across fields and organizations as a new kind of umbrella paradigm, helping to break binary thinking and encourage designs and partnerships that thoughtfully transcend discipline.
It candidly explores the potential and promise of its application in practice, and the possible consequence of its use.
What Now?
Help us continue the effort!
We hope you will join us in continuing to push against conventional approaches that fall short, and seek ways to inspire practitioners and funders to work differently.
While our formal collaboration as Founding Practitioners has ended, the website and resources available here will stay open and free. Its ongoing value, we hope, will be in its influence on the direction of our practice, and on the imagination and work of our colleagues.
