HANDS-ON Experience Learning
BUILDING COALITIONS
OPPORTUNITY
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FEBRUARY 2023
Drive public innovation by reigniting civil society
BUILDING COALITIONS: THE POWER OF SYNERGY
Apartheid’s legacy continues to divide us in deep and undeniable ways, but civil society coalitions across class, race and economic sectors can inspire new ways of accelerating change. This learning brief explores communications and advocacy campaigns that demonstrate the power of coalitions to effect transformation. It includes case studies of: Messages for Mothers (M4M), Youth Capital’s Part of the Action and Real Reform for ECD (also known as Real Reform).
There is a growing gap between the pace of innovation and the ability of governments and civil society to harness it for the public good. Its monetisation has concentrated global wealth and widened the gap between the top 10% and the rest of the world’s population. The pace of innovation continues to accelerate,1 largely due to the instant synergistic power of advanced technologies such as the Internet, 5G and big data analysis.2 Government and civil society must be at the forefront of ensuring that the energy and power of this knowledge capital is harnessed for broad societal benefit, but that can’t be done at a snail’s pace and in the same old ways. The speed of compound innovation – and its desirable and undesirable social impacts – requires rapid synthesis and adaptation of technology as well as changes in human behaviour.
While in the past many civil society organisations (CSOs) made great strides by putting their heads down and staying singularly focused on addressing the need at hand, their ability to influence broader social change now largely depends on their connectedness. Within this context, the power of synergy comes from the:
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Kurzweil, R. 2001. The law of accelerating returns. https://www.kurzweilai.net/ the-law-of-accelerating-return
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Canning, M. et al. 2020. Creating the government of the future: uncovering the building blocks of change to become more anticipatory, human-centered, and resilient. Deloitte Center for Government Insights. https://www2.deloitte. com/content/dam/Deloitte/br/Documents/public-sector/Deloitte-Future-ofgovernment.pdf
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Krishna, A. 2002. Active social capital: tracing the roots of development and democracy. New York: Columbia University Press.
DRIVE PUBLIC INNOVATION BY REIGNITING CIVIL SOCIETY
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creative energy that sparks from unlikely networks;3
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the superlinear scaling properties of social networks – each time a social network doubles in size, the number of connections increases roughly fourfold;4 and
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the influence of bottom-up “political” constituencies in shaping public demand for change.5
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West, G. 2017. Scale: the universal laws of life, growth and death in organisms, cities and companies. New York: Penguin Books, p. 317.
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Acemoglu, D. and Robinson, J. 2012. Why nations fail: the origins of power, prosperity and poverty. New York: Crown.
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