September 11, 2017

Bridging Impacts: Finding Cross-Sector Solutions

Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions
Bridging Impacts: Finding Cross-Sector Solutions

In September 2015, world leaders signed off on the United Nations 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs)—a roadmap to tackling climate change, eliminating poverty and hunger, and putting in place sustainable energy sources, water, and industry by 2030.

To achieve these goals and the 169 targets underpinning them, problems can no longer be solved for one sector without taking into consideration the interconnected impacts on others.

A new initiative—the Bridge Collaborative—works to solve the many, often interconnected problems, that touch the sectors of health, development, and environment.

“Our ability to achieve the Sustainable Development goals hinge on a how we approach some of the world’s most complex challenges,” said Lydia Olander, director of the Ecosystem Services Program at Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions and a member of the initiative’s founding Secretariat. “Through the Bridge Collaborative, we are developing a common language, framework, and evidence base for shared cross sector solutions.”

For the last year, experts from the Bridge Collaborative’s partnering organizations, The Nature Conservancy, PATH, Duke University, and the International Food Policy Research Institute, along with 150 experts from both practitioner and academic organizations have been developing common approaches to problem solving that the three sectors could agree to and use.

They’ve found this first year is that each sector already uses some form of evidence-based research design and action planning but that methods vary and ideas about the strength of evidence differ, erecting obstacles to creation of cross-sector impact.

“To help these sectors ‘talk’ to one another, we’ve been working to create shared principles that not only align problem solving strategies across the health, development, and environment sectors, but also allow a shared assessment of evidence in order to agree on what makes good evidence for all,” Olander said. “Common approaches for two linked areas of practice—strategic logic models and evidence grading—could unlock cross sector collaboration.”

A public launch of the initiative is planned in October 2017 in London, where publications that capture principles developed by the Bridge Collaborative and guidance for creating comparable results chains across sectors and evaluating evidence from multiple sectors in common terms will be discussed.

In the next two years, the initiative will focus on aligning priorities for cross sector action, testing the shared problem-solving approach in real-world scenarios, and expanding the network of experts engaged in cross sector dialogue and problem solving.

For more information on the Bridge Collaborative, visit nieps.org/kl1730eaoBf.

Work on this project is funded by The Nature Conservancy. Photo by Jared Lazarus, Duke University Photography.

--By Erin McKenzie