Recent Comments……..
Comment 1;
The DRR financing flow appears broadly sound, but it remains insufficiently inclusive.
International agencies often prioritize producing policy signals and narratives, while investing less in the sustained, hands-on engagement needed to translate these into transformative change on the ground. The UN system also falls short in applying the right level of effort and in penetrating entrenched country-level, tangential, and unskilled bureaucracies to drive policy translation, stimulate meaningful development action, inject stronger idea incentives into weak and fragmented governance arrangements, and build the capacity required to govern and deliver localized, risk-informed, last-mile development.
Against this backdrop, a critical question persists: how much have development partners actually achieved in service delivery after spending billions on SDG-related ideas, knowledge production, and technology transfer? It increasingly appears that development partners have yet to meaningfully penetrate and catalyze transformative change in LDCs and other developing countries. In many settings, the UN system is perceived and treated more like a national CSO than a system-level enabler of structural change, which is deeply concerning for institutional fitness for planning and development.
Unfortunately, the efforts of development partners (UN agencies and INGOs) have not been sufficient to convert policy intent into localized, context-driven policy and programmatic action. What is needed is stronger risk-informed intervention capacity across central, regional, and last-mile actors, alongside systematic technical capacity-building at every tier of governance using tools, techniques, and implementation approaches that match local landscapes, social dynamics, and resource endowments.
These challenges persist largely because many development partners still face technical gaps, weak and ineffective mechanisms for applied knowledge transfer, limited nexus-building, and recurring shortcomings in stakeholder identification and partnering. Too often, knowledge, ideas, and technologies are transferred without adequate contextual fit.
Most critically, programs, projects, and schemes are sometimes anchored to the wrong institutions or counterparts, particularly through inappropriate selection of DRM partners, which undermines ownership, weakens sector-level coordination and partnerships, and ultimately reduces uptake and transformative impact.
These constraints continue to undermine development partner-led approaches and the pursuit of transformative change.
We therefore request an opportunity to undertake targeted R&D on this agenda to generate practical, evidence-based solutions that bridge these gaps and enable more context-appropriate development planning and more effective interventions.