45 / 88
45
International Seabed Authority and the Commonwealth
Secretariat on oceans governance and ‘downstream’ activ-
ities related to the UNEP Shelf Programme, and the World
Bank on the Global Partnership for Oceans – promises to
strengthen the financial sustainability of GRID-Arendal’s
operations, while enhancing the relevance and impact of
its development activities through involvement in pro-
grammatic interventions with longer-term perspectives
and “rolling” financing plans.
Experience from the biennium has also highlighted the
potential for GRID-Arendal to make more effective use
of its comparative advantage as a ‘nimble networker’
, i.e.
the capacity to bring all manner of stakeholders together
around complex issues to help identify and broadcast
practical solutions that will push policy and thus contrib-
ute to good change. It’s a brand of ‘soft advocacy’ that
works because the focus is on pragmatic solutions, col-
laboration, and clear messaging.
13.2
At the level of operations
A clear ‘tactical’ lesson from the past two years is that,
while GRID-Arendal is already well-known for its stellar
series of publications – which have represented its most
powerful and visible marketing vehicle up until now –
there is great scope for pushing change through ‘active’
outreach
and dissemination activities that go well beyond
the classic launch event and even digital media (what has
come to be known as “life after launch”). The scope for
this type of engagement, which harkens back to the early
days of GRID-Arendal’s extensive outreach programmes
for journalists in the former Soviet republics, is large and
cannot be met by GRID-Arendal and UNEP alone. The or-
ganisation is well positioned to push the boundaries for
this type of activity in collaboration with its partners.
The biennium has also illuminated a simple truth: that
bringing about good change, in the end, comes down to
reaching people who have influence, and reaching them
when the hour is ‘ripe’
(witness the effect of Living Planet:
Connected Planet, the RRA produced for the Convention
on Migratory Species). We need to be more strategic,
more circumspect and more courageous in targeting the
message – it is not enough to identify the ‘decision mak-
ers’ in the public and private sector spheres. Our true tar-
get is their constituency, whether they be key segments of
the electorate, civil society advocates and NGOs, journal-
ists, academia, financial and commercial actors – the ones
for whom they sit up and listen.
The main lesson from 2011, echoing reflections from the
2010 Progress Report, is that the success of any strate-
gic realignment hinges on strengthening operational ef-
fectiveness through dedicated application of the Results
Based Management (RbM) approach.
By the end of the
biennium, GRID-Arendal had learned and demonstrated
the value of RbM from the vantage point of reporting, with
generous support from NORAD. The challenge going for-
ward will be to mainstream RbM as a “management tool”.
As accepted policy, it is now necessary to embed the tool in
operations in order to realise its potential for significant im-
provements in project and programme design, monitoring
and evaluation, and feeding lessons forward in the project
and programme cycle.
Moreover, given the extent and value
of its collaboration with UNEP, mainstreaming also implies
that GRID-Arendal has a strong incentive to work very close-
ly with UNEP in its own efforts to strengthen operational
effectiveness through the results management approach.
To support this policy, GRID-Arendal is in the process of
developing a Monitoring & Evaluation Framework that will
underpin future programmes of work and, hopefully, serve
as a value-added in future collaboration with UNEP.
14 Audited financial statement
The Audited Financial Statement (Annex 3) from KPMG
was undertaken in accordance with the ISRS 4400 En-
gagements to Perform Agreed Upon Procedures Regard-
ing Financial Information.