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Supporting innovation for systemic change through public policy: the case of the Dominican Republic

by: Inka Mattila, resident representative UNDP DR

By PNUD Rep. Dominicana

April 20^th, 2022

Innovation has been at the heart of progress since the dawn of humanity, igniting technological change and unleashing the power to find solutions to collective problems. In many regards, innovation has impacted the way we live. Yet, nowadays, as modern societies, we find ourselves at a significant crossroads as witnesses to rapid transformations, as well as to the rise of new challenges for sustainable human development.

The COVID-19 crisis was a wake-up call that drew attention to the urgent need of rethinking preparedness and resilience to tackle present and future challenges. Currently, there is persistent, rising inequality across the globe. Conflicts and poverty continue to drive international migration flows, as the unplanned urban sprawl in the developing world pressures demographic and sociopolitical cohesion.

Furthermore, social protection schemes are threatened by budgetary constraints while health systems have been overwhelmed. Around the world, there seems to be an erosion of democracy and the rise of authoritarianism. Gender equality is still an unrealized goal for which traditional development approaches seem insufficient.

There are also new and potential risks emerging for which the international community must show a united front. For one, the challenges of the climate crisis demand a sound and comprehensive pact that can deliver clean energy sources and sustainable ways of production and consumption, that is if we are to tackle the looming environmental crisis on the near horizon.

And yet, despite these challenges, the 21st century is full of potential for creating new paths to sustainable prosperity and social inclusion. Innovation is key to unlocking that potential.

Supporting innovation for systemic change through public policy: the case of the Dominican Republic

Convinced that old recipes won’t suffice to tackle these challenges and drive transformation, UNDP is placing innovation at the heart of our approach to supporting countries achieve sustainable development. At UNDP, we believe that innovation for development “is about identifying more effective solutions that add value for the people affected by development challenges – people and their governments”. Thus, we are purposively striving to streamline our innovation efforts so that everything we do as an organization result in improving peoples’ lives and reaching the SDGs.

In the Dominican Republic country office, we are embracing innovation at every level, bringing forward our global network of knowledge and experience to improve our support to national institutions, change the culture of development work, and deliver solutions responsive to change that have a direct positive impact on people’s lives.

At the national level, we are fortunate to be at the center of a growing recognition by policymakers that innovation can be a driving force to address the country’s development challenges. In close partnership with the National Government’s Innovation Taskforce, we are aiming at changing the conversation, demystifying the notion that innovation is a synonym for digital technologies and inserting innovation in the DNA of policymaking.

In 2021, the DR government created the Innovation Cabinet, an inter-ministerial coordination taskforce mandated to craft a National Innovation Policy. The presidential decree directed the work of the cabinet’s affiliated institutions into five working themes: 1) governance, 2) human capital, 3) investment and partnerships, 4) culture and citizenry, and 5) energy transition and sustainability.

UNDP in the Dominican Republic was invited by the Presidency to support this initiative and bring our global expertise to craft such a pivotal policy. From the start, our global Strategic Innovation Unit, our country Accelerator Lab team, and our national specialists provided state-of-the-art methodological guidance, in line with principles outlined in our updated strategic plan, in which we believe in innovation that aims to work with countries to achieve structural transformation, build resilience and leave no one behind. The experience is a great example of how UNDP's global and national expertise can be brought together to serve the countries UNDP works in.

Our support to this policy has been framed upon what we believe to be critical enablers of progress in the 21st century: strategic innovation, digitalization, and development financing, enriched by the various experiences in innovation policy and programming in which UNDP is working worldwide.

We have exercised our integrating role, bridging connections between our partner governments in the LAC region that have been on this path before. In addition, the Strategic Innovation Unit proposed a comprehensive, system-wide examination of the institutional culture as a first step forward in facing development challenges from a systems thinking perspective.

The relevance of this contribution cannot be overstated: UNDP has helped our government partners access first-hand accounts of how other countries have advanced toward enabling innovation ecosystems. In that sense, UNDP’s global expertise and networking capacity contributions have been pathbreaking.

Additionally, our inclusive, whole-of-society approach has permeated the policymaking process from the beginning, using the 2030 Agenda principles as our guiding star. This is why the process included a series of international (e.g., Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Paraguay), as well as national consultations with public institutions, the private sector, academia, civil society organizations and citizens.

UNDP accompanied the Innovation Taskforce to four (4) regional consultations in which innovation was framed within the specific social context of each region. The result has been a robust recollection of what matters most to the multiple stakeholders in Dominican society and of each region. While the process has been rigorously technical, at the same time, it has been widely participatory, putting people and their concerns at the center of problem-solving.

There are a few lessons that are worth highlighting from this experience. For one, innovation-driven thinking challenges us all to move away from highly structured policy initiatives toward a more agile, disruptive, and highly responsive way of doing policy. This is a key criterion for organizations that can embrace change more efficaciously.

Secondly, innovation entails an inward exercise to take a deep, self-reflective, and systemic look at policies and processes, to diagnose where we are and outline a plan for where the country wants to be, something we are working on at our country office. Last, if innovation is to become part of the country’s DNA, we must break away from systemic dispersion and move toward an integrated, well-articulated ecosystem in which all stakeholders can engage meaningfully.

In the face of the post-pandemic recovery, we sense that the country is more creative and open to change, ready to build back forward and stronger. We are confident that innovation is not an end in itself but a journey towards a more sustainable, inclusive, and resilient Dominican Republic for present and future generations where no one is left behind.

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