(1) Structured dialogue (such as the ORID framework), experience maps, hypotheses diagrams, among other methods, are effective tools for co-creation of social innovation solutions, public policy and development intervention proposals. These tools are particularly relevant when designing virtual spaces for collaboration, where usability and technology acceptance challenges with online collaboration tools and videoconferencing systems can become a barrier. They help overcoming these barriers combined with effective facilitation, often expanding the number and diversity of participants, and the depth of their participation.  (2) The competitive dynamic of innovation challenges can be a barrier toward actual innovation. More work can be done to create methods that reward collaboration and creativity in overcoming widely shared, but seldomly addressed barriers to social and community development. In contrast, when competition is a feature of the process, distributed voting to choose the winners of our community innovation challenges greatly increased the public recognition of the process and raised the profile and prestige of the participants. (3) During the pandemic, and framed within our learning loop of Social Capital and Vulnerability, we observed a statistically significant and negative relation between the participation in the production, maintenance, and use of community commons or collective assets and economic vulnerability. Based on this, interventions aimed at participatory design of community commons hold great promise for reducing vulnerability of the territories.  (4) Based on the impact evaluation of our community recycling pilot (Mi Barrio sin Residuos), we validated our hypothesis that participatory waste management services that connect waste picker collectives with households, involving the latter more closely in recycling process, can increase trust between them. This, in turn,  opened interesting opportunities for knowledge transfer and growth, particularly, by further exploring how to establish and maintain  engagement between participatory neighborhood  institutions, such as neighbor’s commissions, and waste picker collectives.  (5) Citizen engagement and strong base community organizationshas an impact on the performance of what literature calls street level bureaucrats, that is, public civil servants who work directly at the interface with citizens, delivering public services.

Social innovation processes and participator toolkits:

https://www.py.undp.org/content/paraguay/es/home/blog/2020/Constructing-Hypotheses-for-Development.html

https://www.py.undp.org/content/paraguay/es/home/blog/2021/Moiru-what-we-learned-integrating-community-participation-and-social-innovation.html

Inclusive Recycling Learning Loop:

https://www.py.undp.org/content/paraguay/es/home/blog/2020/Leveraging-Collective-Intelligence-to-Improve-Asuncions-Waste-Management.html 

https://www.py.undp.org/content/paraguay/es/home/blog/2021/recycling-as-a-collective-action-dilemma.html 

https://www.py.undp.org/content/paraguay/es/home/blog/2021/a-day-in-the-life-of-Asuncions-waste-pickers.html 

(technical report) https://www.py.undp.org/content/paraguay/es/home/library/hablemos-sobre-como-trabajar-mejor.html

https://www.py.undp.org/content/paraguay/es/home/blog/2021/prototyping-a-new-generation-of-eco-friendly-wastebaskets.html 

https://www.py.undp.org/content/paraguay/es/home/blog/2021/A-day-in-the-life-of-Asuncion-waste-pickers---Part-II.html 

https://www.py.undp.org/content/paraguay/es/home/blog/2022/Mi-Barrio-sin-Residuos--innovacion-en-reciclaje.html 

Social Capital Learning Loop: 

(policy brief) https://www.undp.org/publications/social-capital-paraguay-asset-combatting-vulnerability-during-covid-19-pandemic 

https://www.py.undp.org/content/paraguay/es/home/blog/2021/Mapping-social-capital--economic-vulnerability--and-collective-action-in-times-of-COVID-19---Part-1.html

During the last year, our activities related to citizen participation have been integral and cross-cutting of our other frontier challenges. This meant they were focused mostly on (1) supporting dialogue among diverse and typically disconnected or sometimes polarized actors, (2) facilitating the construction and systematization of collective intelligence among these actors in order to cocreate proposals, or (3) enabling interaction and collaboration among them to address a collective action dilemma.   To date, we have not been able to experiment with participatory governance methods, processes, or institutions that focus on decision-making and are binding, creating public commitments for the execution of public policies. One barrier for this is the legal framework for participatory governance in Paraguay, which does not give participatory processes or institutions any binding authority. This, in turn, depresses interest and participation in these spaces. We would like to experiment with binding processes, for example in the participatory codesign and allocation of resources for community public services, goods, or spaces, to observe how this affects, and is affected by, the outcomes of the policy decisions that are taken by the public, the levels of trust among people and their instructions, the quality of our participation capacities, and, overall, the quality of our democratic institutions as a pathway towards sustainable development.  We would like to prioritize overcoming this barrier at this point by designing a complete learning loop and experiment, for example, on participatory budgeting.  

As noted earlier, the goal of most of our activities in this portfolio was focused on (1) supporting dialogue among diverse and typically disconnected or sometimes polarized set of institutional and grassroots actors, (2) facilitating and systematizing collective intelligence from them in order to cocreate proposals, and (3) enabling interaction and collaboration among them to address a collective action dilemma.   Goal (1) was the focus of our structured and participatory social dialogues, which we designed and facilitated, including (1.1) the Scientific Dialogues series, where mostly academic researchers debated and co-created proposals for the new flagship research funding program of the National Science and Technology Council (CONACYT) or for the reinsertion of scholars who went studying abroad with public funding, (1.2) the Dialogues with the National Network of Monitoring and Evaluation, where they agreed upon actions for promoting evidence-based policy-making, and (1.3) the -upcoming- Participatory Forum on Family Agriculture Innovation, where community members and scholars will explore how what type of R&D institution better suits their community and expected future.   Goal (2) was the focus of other more innovative interventions such as our social innovation processes (e.g.,  Moiru, the CONACYT social innovation challenge, Calle.Idea, etc.), the participatory mapping efforts we engaged in with a waste pickers’ collective, and the diverse set of mapping efforts within our collaboration with the National Strategy of Innovation (ENI) through Wendá.   Goal (3) was the focus on of our intervention in piloting new services for addressing recycling as a collective dilemma or strengthening capacities for participatory planning in family health units, and also of our learning loop on social capital and vulnerability during the pandemic.   Overall, most of the data we were working with was generated by the process itself and, secondarily by a review of administrative and public data or policy documents. The Ushahidi-based mapping platform, Wendá, developed with ENI and the international initiative “frena la curva” served as a place to collect and analyze crowd-sourced geospatial and qualitative data from participants in many of these processes, as well as to promote them. In other cases, we collected, systematized, and analyzed both primary and secondary data ourselves, leading to the emergence of our continuously updated data and analysis repository on Github: https://github.com/AccLabPY/

For the innovation contests, mapping existing solutions was an important step for arriving at more focused set of challenges. For the policy dialogues, it was key to ensure that the participants had a shared basis of information and room to express and work out differences. In both cases, we employed the ORID framework for debate, and also developed visual tools using miro.com, such as “experience maps,” “hypothesis diagrams,” “policy goal matrixes,” and “consensus/descent matrixes” to facilitate a virtual process of co-creation of policy or innovation proposals. For our experimental pilots, integrating a solid impact evaluation scheme that was both feasible within the resources at hand but reliable in its design, was paramount to derive conclusions from them and increase the trust from our partners in the value of our methods. 

Civil society actors were the main partners for the policy dialogues. They codesigned the methodologies with us, provided objective information for the ORID dialogues, promoted the events to recruit participants, and co-facilitated the small discussion groups. Partners included:   Paraguayan Network of Evaluators (REPAE) Association Antonio Lopez Scholarship Recipients (ASOBECAL) Paraguayan Association of Scientific Researchers (ADICIP) Paraguayan Scientific Society (SCP)   Moiru NGO’s winning initiatives, co-created their solution through our social innovation process: Peasant and Indigenous Women Organization (CONAMURI) - Caaguazú Heads of Household Association (Kuña Jero) Virgen Maria’s and San Antonio’s Women Committee - San Ignacio, Misiones Mbokaja Poty Small Producers Committee – Ayolas, Misiones Guerrilla Verde   In our inclusive recycling pilot, we engaged with Foundation Moises Bertoni. We are currently in the process of integrating the results and learnings of our impact evaluation into their proposal for the next stage of this pilot.   Fort the third stage and experimental intervention of the Positive Deviance project, which is connected also with the public innovation challenge, we worked with Tesaireka Paraguay, a network of organizations that work specifically on promoting Primary Health Care as a right, working closely with Family Health Units across several regions of Paraguay. 

We are working with the National University of Asunción to design and implement a participatory forum that will engage a local rural community in the design of an R&D institution that will be established on a location that is collectively owned by the community. We also collaborated with the National Council on Science and Technology (CONACYT) to help them implement their social innovation challenge, building upon our previous experience with Moiru. 

For the inclusive recycling project, our private sector partners included Soluciones Ecológicas, a recycling and sustainable waste management company and the local Coca-Cola Bottling company, They co-designed the prototype of the waste collection service offered by members of the San Francisco Neighborhood recyclers’ association and built upon both our relationship with waste pickers and our participatory mapping processes to decide pilot neighborhoods for their implementation.  We were also able to integrate learning into this action by designing and implementing its impact evaluation.

Government actors were the main partners for the innovation processes. Their degree of involvement varied, but as a group they collaborated to codesigned the methodologies with us, provide policy documents and other information as context, promote the events to recruit participants, and cofacilitate the cocreation of proposals, and as part of the jury to select winners.   National Innovation Strategy (ENI) National SDG Commission National Science and Technology Council (CONACYT) Ministry of Justice Ministry of Public Health and Social Welfare   We develop informative workshops with different government institutions such as the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock (MAG), the National Service for Seed Quality (SENAVE), and the Ministry of Women. With the aim of bringing organizations closer to these institutions and their current support programs

Structured dialogue among diverse actors representing diverse institutions and sector is not common in Paraguay. For the participants, the new experience of coming together to identify divergent interests, attempt to create consensus, and define priorities at first generated distrust or anxiety, particularly as they questioned the genuine neutrality of the space. However, the experience of being able to voice their opinions, discuss with others, and make new connections to their peers generated enthusiasm. The activities highlighted for us the value of deliberation as a social learning process and the need to greatly expand deliberative skills and capacities among government institutions and civil society in general.   In the case of Mi Barrio sin Residuos, we feel confident about our methodology, and particularly, about the fact that we were able to incorporate this into an action that was not fully under our control to design. It serves as a showcase of how to integrate learning in action, compromising just enough. Other than evaluating the impact, the mixed methods we applied enabled us to engage allies in the process of learning and helped them buying into our proposals.