Key Publications
Bigger Change Faster
Today’s greatest sustainable development challenges can only be solved if we work together more effectively across the global development, health, and environmental communities. This report, co-authored by the Bridge Collaborative and UNDP, highlights three global challenges that require cross-sector solutions, and actions that can be taken now to drive bigger change faster for people and the world we share.
Delivering Bigger Change Faster: A Workbook on Strengthening Proposals for Projects With Cross-sector Impacts, Version 2.0
While we know that cross-sector thinking is essential, it is not commonplace. Delivering Bigger Change Faster: A Workbook on Strengthening Proposals for Projects With Cross-sector Impacts, Version 2.0 is a resource for teams that are fairly new to cross-sector thinking but already have a proposal for creating multi-sector impacts.
Training Videos
Bridge Collaborative Practitioner’s Guide: Principles and Guidance for Cross-Sector Action Planning and Evidence Evaluation
The health, development and environment sectors increasingly realize that they cannot achieve their respective goals by acting in isolation. Yet, as they pivot to act collectively, they face challenges in finding and interpreting evidence on sectoral interrelationships, and thus in developing effective evidence-based responses. Each sector already uses some form of evidence-based research, design and action planning, but methods vary and ideas about the strength of evidence differ, creating stumbling blocks in the way of cross-sector impact. A new initiative, called the Bridge Collaborative, sets out to spark cross-sector problem solving by developing common approaches that the three sectors could agree to and use. Specifically, the collaborative has focused on two linked areas of practice that could unlock cross sector collaboration – results chains and the evaluation of supporting evidence. Through this process, the collaborative has provided a platform for dialogue and collaboration among professionals from across these sectors, allowing for face-to-face interaction and discussion to build professional networks. This document captures a set of principles identified and used by the Collaborative, along with a detailed set of guidance for creating comparable results chains across sectors and evaluating evidence from multiple disciplines in common terms. These principles and guidance reflect novel contributions from the Bridge Collaborative as well as restatements of existing recommendations that resonated among health, development and environment researchers and practitioners.
Complementary Resources:
Sector Adjacency Assessment Tool | Supporting Tables
Aligning Evidence Generation and Use Across Health, Development, and Environment
Although health, development, and environment challenges are interconnected, evidence remains fractured across sectors due to methodological and conceptual differences in research and practice. Aligned methods are needed to support Sustainable Development Goal advances and similar agendas. The Bridge Collaborative, an emergent research-practice collaboration, presents principles and recommendations that help harmonize methods for evidence generation and use. Recommendations were generated in the context of designing and evaluating evidence of impact for interventions related to five global challenges (stabilizing the global climate, making food production sustainable, decreasing air pollution and respiratory disease, improving sanitation and water security, and solving hunger and malnutrition) and serve as a starting point for further iteration and testing in a broader set of contexts and disciplines. We adopted six principles and emphasize three methodological recommendations: (1) creation of compatible results chains, (2) consideration of all relevant types of evidence, and (3) evaluation of strength of evidence using a unified rubric. We provide detailed suggestions for how these recommendations can be applied in practice, streamlining efforts to apply multi-objective approaches and/or synthesize evidence in multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary teams. These recommendations advance the necessary process of reconciling existing evidence standards in health, development, and environment, and initiate a common basis for integrated evidence generation and use in research, practice, and policy design.
More About the Bridge Collaborative
Gulf of Mexico Ecosystem Service Logic Models & Socio-Economic Indicators (GEMS)
Duke University's Nicholas Institute, The Harte Research Institute, and The Nature Conservancy led a project to advance standardized metrics of restoration success with input from stakeholders, relevant federal agencies, and technical experts from the five Gulf States. The project is summarized through the documents below. Find out more about the project at nicholasinstitute.duke.edu/project/gems.
This work was supported by the National Academies’ Gulf Research Program.
Cross-Sectoral Collaboration for Clean Cooking (with Clean Cooking Alliance)
The Bridge Collaborative brought together people and organizations from health, environment, and development to promote collaboration across sectors to more effectively address critical global issues. This case study package applies that guiding principle to clean cooking. We assessed a total of four national clean cooking interventions from Nepal and Kenya and consider the evidence for the co-benefits of clean cooking on health, the climate, the environment, gender equality, and livelihoods. Based on the lessons learned from the case studies, we then provide recommendations for leaders of future clean cooking interventions to realize the co-benefits of clean cooking by working more effectively across sectors.
Refugee Action for People & Planet (with Center for Global Development)
Since August 2017, over 740,000 Rohingya refugees have fled atrocities and violence in Myanmar to Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. There are now one million Rohingya refugees in Cox’s Bazar, comprising about 30 percent of the population. This increase, coupled with immediate needs for fuelwood and shelter, has diminished livelihoods due to deforestation and loss of access to land; soil and slope erosion; fuelwood scarcity and associated risks to safety of people collecting fuelwood; increased encroachment and forest degradation; declining water quality, groundwater reserve depletion, and air pollution; decreasing soil quality; and climate vulnerability. To restore cleared forest areas, and improve human and environmental wellbeing, international actors must work with the Government of Bangladesh to implement a long-term forest landscape restoration (FLR) plan for Cox’s Bazar.
Funding Landscape Reports (with Panorama)
Foundations and private philanthropists have made only limited funding available for activities that deliver both health and environmental benefits. Instead, the majority of funding is still given within traditional silos, such as health, environment, or development. The planetary health community, and other like-minded communities, are grappling with ways to unlock the needed resources to promote new thinking at the systems level and implement practical programs on the ground. To inform these efforts, Panorama and the Bridge Collaborative have partnered to assess the landscape of philanthropic donors for health and environment.
Cultured Protein Assessment Reports
These reports were developed as part of a series of interrelated assessments regarding alternative proteins. The development of these reports was led by PATH in collaboration with Duke University, the International Food Policy Research Institute, and The Nature Conservancy through the Bridge Collaborative.
