Designing a national systems change initiative in India:
Finding “Common Ground” for improved livelihoods, climate action, and social equity
Overview
The degradation of India’s Commons has devastating ripple effects for communities, ecosystems, and the country’s economy. Landscapes are increasingly vulnerable to natural disasters, while people depending on the Commons are further exposed to financial shocks, nullifying opportunities for gains in social and economic inclusion.
To address this triple crisis of livelihoods, climate, and social equity, in 2022, CoRe joined strategic changemakers in India’s environmental sectors to co-design a collaborative governance initiative for systems change around the Commons. The result of this effort, Common Ground, is a national initiative that uses a collaborative action framework to convene civil society, government, and the private sector around systems change for inclusive natural resource governance and resilient rural livelihoods. Today, this platform for ecosystem entrepreneurship is anchored by Living Landscapes, a fit-for-purpose backbone organization that serves as the initiative’s permanent convenor and secretariat.
From an initial exploratory phase in 2022 through to the consolidation of Common Ground as a fully operating collaborative action platform today, CoRe has supported its partners at every stage of building out the initiative. Using our expertise in multi-actor processes and systems change analysis, we helped to co-design Common Ground as a collaborative model for broad based change across government, the private sector, and civil society. Our central contributions include the conception and facilitation of the design process of the initiative, the co-creation of the initiative’s theory of change and strategy, as well as devising a corresponding learning, monitoring, and evaluation (LME) framework. To date, Common Ground has raised over USD $10 million in funding.
Through continuing engagement with Common Ground, we support its key objectives for rural communities across India: healthy Commons rooted in inclusive governance; equitable, durable livelihood gains; and community resilience.
““As the range of macro-drivers fast outpace local communities’ ability to respond, it is critical that we find “common ground” to address differing mental models, foster a plurality of solutions and approaches, translate innovative thinking into practice, and co-create responsive social infrastructure with communities to catalyze change at an unprecedented pace and scale.””
The insidious impacts of land degradation
The degradation of the Commons has caused severe impacts for communities. 350 million people in rural settings who depend on the Commons experience greater precarity and are less able to withstand external shocks as a result of this degradation.
For example, important ecosystems such as community forests, pastures, and water bodies have a reduced capacity to tolerate and recover from extreme weather events.
The cost of this ongoing land degradation and its impact on communities and ecosystems continues to mount. India’s economic losses from land degradation and land use change in 2014-15 totaled USD 46.9 billion, equaling 2.5% of the country’s GDP at the time. 1 Since these measurements were taken in 2015, the proportion of degraded land in India has only increased– going from 4.42% to 9.45% in 2019.
Exacerbating these trends are systemic inequalities that heavily impact marginalized groups. Historically, environmental governance structures have not been able to fully address the concerns of marginalized groups or promote their leadership, especially for women, scheduled castes, and tribal peoples. These groups also have a significant dependence on the Commons, given traditional patterns of use and land ownership.
The consequences of land degradation also extend to areas such as education and income generation. Women, in particular, face even fewer chances for employment and study when they are forced to work harder to access dwindling natural resources. 3
Laying the groundwork for unity among diverse actors
In the context of these acute impacts, CoRe worked with partners[1] in 2022 to analyze systems governing India’s Commons[AS2] . We examined critical barriers to the realization of what would become Common Ground’s central vision: healthy Commons[AS3] rooted in inclusive governance. Further, CoRe supported partners in selecting strategic priorities to bring this vision to life.
Above all, we observed that dispersed and uncoordinated efforts - whether local, regional or national - severely limited the capacity of key actors to achieve effective grassroots mobilization, policy influence, knowledge exchange, and integrated programming that can generate multidimensional impacts.
With our partners, we assessed that while there were numerous actors working across the ecosystem and large-scale investments in natural resources, climate action, and livelihood improvement, a disjointed approach was a critical barrier to meaningful systems change. This analysis identified a strong need for an initiative that connected diverse actors working across themes and sectors related to rural development, driving them to accelerate and complement each other’s efforts.
““We play the unique role of convener, connector, and catalyst.” ”
Delivering instrumental contributions from analysis to action
In response, CoRe helped to conduct a formalized systems change analysis centered on convergence through 2022. At this stage, we worked to:
Co-design a collaborative model for systems change that includes civil society, communities, governments, and private sector actors
Co-create a proposed organizational and governance structure for Common Ground, including the structure of the initiative’s anchor organization, Living Landscapes
Identify common objectives that diverse actors could coalesce around
Identify pathways to meaningful change that included the participation of multiple sectors and industries
Consult with practitioners, academics, think tanks, technology innovators, policy advisors, and ecosystem orchestrators to consolidate insights on priority work areas and strategy
In the months following the systems change analysis (2023), CoRe helped to operationalize this collaborative model for systems change by supporting partners in:
Formally establishing Common Ground as an initiative of Living Landscapes, with both national and international financing capabilities
Developing a funding strategy based on a collaboratively written Investment Prospectus that raised more than $10 million in initial funding over the course of just 18-months
Solidifying more than 25 written commitments from diverse partners who have joined the initiative and signed a joint Statement of Commitment
Co-designing a learning, monitoring, and evaluation framework and system that emphasize learning and assess partnership impact across a theory of change for systems transformation in both the short- and long-term
Building on this momentum, CoRe’s support to the initiative today centers on:
Capacity building with Common Ground implementing partners
Enhancing multistakeholder dialogue processes and their enabling environments across partners and external stakeholders
Monitoring and evaluating impact to develop evidence and guide strategic planning
Narrative building for systems transformation, linking community-led perspectives and expertise to national and international policy dialogue
Mapping the path towards systems change
Our expertise in supporting diverse actors to unite around a common strategy for systems change allows us to champion the importance of collaborative action for strengthening grassroots mobilization, policy influence, and programmatic coordination in support of more inclusive environmental governance and resilient rural livelihoods.
Within CoRe’s theory of change, this graphic illustrates the progress that CoRe helped realize in strengthening capacity for multi-stakeholder collaboration by:
Co-creating a new platform for collaborative action
Supporting this platform in developing institutional and implementation capacities
Co-designing a collective path to systems change
As Common Ground proposes a new approach to the Commons that is predicated on collective action across actors, domains and scales, it champions the implementation of governance innovations for impact at scale while itself representing a new model of collaborative governance for systems change in rural development.
Moving forward to resilient rural livelihoods, our support to Common Ground enables pathways towards concrete system shifts that will facilitate:
The centralization of Commons and commoning within rural development and environmental governance, centering women’s agency
The alignment of policy and programmatic directions and financial flows to support ecologically sound, inclusive rural development
Increased incentives and market opportunities that favor resilient, gender-equitable rural livelihoods
Responsive social infrastructure supporting alignment across sectors working on rural development
In turn, each of these pathways will strengthen action in local landscapes, leading to improved social, ecological, and economic outcomes.
Contributing to the SDGs
By supporting the design and development of Common Ground as a collaborative action platform, CoRe’s work has helped to set the stage for concerted interventions at scale for improved rural livelihoods and inclusive natural resource governance across India.
Our support to Common Ground has focused on key areas for impact within the Sustainable Development Goals framework, including:
Innovative collaboration as well as strengthened local institutions, national networks, and inclusive environmental governance practices, advancing Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions (SDG 16) and Partnerships for the Goals (SDG 17)
Ecological restoration of natural resources on land and bodies of water, contributing to goals of Clean Water and Sanitation (SDG 6), Climate Action (SDG 13) and Life on Land (SDG 15)
Gender-sensitive approaches to environmental governance and the promotion of women’s leadership in the stewardship of the Commons, advancing Gender Equality (SDG 5)
Economic empowerment through community-centric income generation, contributing to the goal of No Poverty (SDG 1)
Social, economic, and political inclusion contributing to the goal of Reduced Inequality (SDG 10)’
What’s Next
In August 2024, Common Ground partners—including Living Landscapes, the Foundation for Ecological Security, UNDP, and CoRe—organized the first Commons Convening, a conference organized to build momentum around a unified agenda for inclusive governance of the Commons across India. [SB2] Over the course of three days, more than 500 attendees discussed ambitions, strategies, and action pathways for building resilient rural livelihoods premised on the Commons. The flagship event helped consolidate a systems change agenda for driving action around the Commons in the coming years.
As Common Ground partners move forward in pursuing inclusive environmental governance of the Commons, CoRe is actively working with the initiative to build out contextually actionable and scalable Landscape Partnership Models, focused on collaborative governance at the scale of a landscape. These would bring together a diverse range of strategic actors relevant to the health and functioning of landscapes, centering community voice and agency.