IIED Strategy 2019–2024
COVID-19: updating our strategy
The pandemic is forcing priorities and ways of working to change as we address the global challenges outlined in this strategy. Read a detailed update by director Andrew Norton.
In five years, we will be in sight of 2030, a make-or-break date for global sustainable development ambitions. This is our moment to step up and go further.
IIED's research takes valuable local solutions to influential global forums, achieving impact at many levels. In a fractured world our network of partners brings together the missing voices and evidence that policymakers need to make the right decisions for people and planet.
From now to 2024, we will play our part to make change happen. We will help vulnerable communities achieve climate resilience and development, simultaneously pushing hard for global action to restrict planetary warming to 1.5°C. We will promote biodiversity alongside social justice, ensuring the women and men closest to the land, ocean and natural resources are heard.
Our work towards healthier, more secure urban futures will emphasise community agency for truly 'local to global' outcomes. From big business to local entrepreneurs and public sector regulators, we will bring a breadth of vision and experience to bear on fairer markets. And underlying everything is our commitment to increasing equality – lived through how we work as well as the results we achieve.
Only one earth
The unprecedented crisis we face – accelerating disruption to the climate, natural world and lives of the most vulnerable people – demands immediate and extraordinary responses. But despite the early promise of the Paris Agreement and Sustainable Development Goals, nations are not yet coming together for a better future.
Increasing nationalism and xenophobia mask destructive interests that threaten both planet and people, eroding the solidarity needed for effective global action. And time is short: from the climate crisis to biodiversity loss, any delay in reaction is potentially catastrophic.
With multilateral governance under threat, new actors will increasingly set the agenda for development action in the private and public spheres. Social activism will provide more of the momentum needed to confront global challenges.
Within this context, IIED will fight for a fairer future, working with established and new partners for the greatest impact. To 2024, we will strengthen our partnerships for change at three levels:
- Working ‘bottom up’ to enhance sustainability and inclusion, in partnerships that mobilise action; we will amplify marginalised voices and represent missing realities
- Shaping innovative ideas for tackling global challenges, alongside experts and influencers that bring diverse perspectives to policy debates, and
- Pursuing yet greater excellence in our research through enhanced collaboration with outstanding institutions in the countries where we work.
IIED’s growing global network, ranging from multilateral institutions to citizen-led social movements, is positioned to ask and answer the most challenging questions and bring radical, locally tested solutions to the forefront of global policy.
IIED director Andrew Norton introduces our new 2019-2024 strategy
In developing this strategy, we consulted our partners, analysed the changing context we work in, and reviewed the last five years. We identified the areas where we can make our best contribution to reducing poverty and inequality, ensuring a liveable climate and preserving the natural world we need for a mutually prosperous future.
Alongside this, we designed a comprehensive Learning and Impact Framework: this essential tool will allow us to track progress, learn continually, and adjust our strategic course as necessary.
At IIED, we are committed to play our part in resolving complex and connected global crises. We look forward to working with you to build a fairer and more sustainable world.
IIED director Andrew Norton
Delivering our ambition
IIED has a history of rigorous and original research that helps drive progress by taking proven local solutions to influential global forums. Our projects make a tangible positive difference in the policies and practice that shape the everyday lives of marginalised women and men, based on their own priorities.
Our theory of change ensures we will deliver solutions that come from the bottom up, are grounded in context and apply local evidence. In turn, that local action shapes workable and effective policy and practice.
Longer-term outcome areas
Strategic challenges
Intermediate outcome areas
With partners,
IIED improves connections, interactions and power dynamics between different actors
Community actors
International agencies
Equitable and effective governance and policies at all levels, from local to global
Increased financial assets and agency for people living in poverty and marginalised communities
Strengthened voice and and rights of people living in poverty and exclusion and their organisations
Increasing inequality
National and local governments
Influencers
The climate crisis
Research and knowledge brokers
Civil society organisations and federations
Propositions for change
An assault on the natural world
With partners,
IIED improves different actors’ capabilities to create and use evidence
With partners,
IIED generates new types of evidence to support sustainable development
Increasing urban risk
Unsustainable markets
Investors
Businesses
Producer organisations
Strategic challenges
An assault on the natural world
Increasing inequality
The climate crisis
Increasing urban risk
Unsustainable markets
Intermediate outcome areas
With partners,
IIED improves connections, interactions and power dynamics between different actors
Community actors
International agencies
National and local governments
Influencers
Research and knowledge brokers
Civil society organisations and federations
Propositions for change
With partners,
IIED generates new types of evidence to support sustainable development
With partners,
IIED improves different actors’ capabilities to create and use evidence
Investors
Businesses
Producer organisations
Longer-term outcome areas
Equitable and effective governance and policies at all levels, from local to global
Increased financial assets and agency for people living in poverty and marginalised communities
Strengthened voice and and rights of people living in poverty and exclusion and their organisations
Strategic challenges
An assault on the natural world
Increasing inequality
The climate crisis
Increasing urban risk
Unsustainable markets
Intermediate outcome areas
With partners,
IIED improves connections, interactions and power dynamics between different actors
Community actors
International agencies
National and local governments
Influencers
Research and knowledge brokers
Civil society organisations and federations
Propositions for change
With partners,
IIED improves different actors’ capabilities to create and use evidence
With partners,
IIED generates new types of evidence to support sustainable development
Investors
Businesses
Producer organisations
Longer-term outcome areas
Equitable and effective governance and policies at all levels, from local to global
Increased financial assets and agency for people living in poverty and marginalised communities
Strengthened voice and and rights of people living in poverty and exclusion and their organisations
Strategic challenges
An assault on the natural world
Increasing inequality
The climate crisis
Increasing urban risk
Unsustainable markets
Intermediate outcome areas
With partners,
IIED improves connections, interactions and power dynamics between different actors
Community actors
International agencies
National and local governments
Influencers
Research and knowledge brokers
Civil society organisations and federations
Propositions for change
With partners,
IIED improves different actors’ capabilities to create and use evidence
With partners,
IIED generates new types of evidence to support sustainable development
Investors
Businesses
Producer organisations
Longer-term outcome areas
Equitable and effective governance and policies at all levels, from local to global
Increased financial assets and agency for people living in poverty and marginalised communities
Strengthened voice and and rights of people living in poverty and exclusion and their organisations
Strategic challenges
An assault on the natural world
Increasing inequality
The climate crisis
Increasing urban risk
Unsustainable markets
Intermediate outcome areas
With partners,
IIED improves connections, interactions and power dynamics between different actors
Community actors
International agencies
National and local governments
Influencers
Research and knowledge brokers
Civil society organisations and federations
Propositions for change
With partners,
IIED improves different actors’ capabilities to create and use evidence
With partners,
IIED generates new types of evidence to support sustainable development
Investors
Businesses
Producer organisations
Longer-term outcome areas
Equitable and effective governance and policies at all levels, from local to global
Increased financial assets and agency for people living in poverty and marginalised communities
Strengthened voice and and rights of people living in poverty and exclusion and their organisations
From 2019-2024 we will develop specific programme-level theories of change that will ensure we are agile enough to meet the needs of a changing context, assess the effectiveness of our work and make changes where needed. And we will build on the four 'impact pathways' that have guided our work over the last three years.
As our research and ideas support others to tread more lightly on this earth, we recognise that our own activities also need scrutiny. We are committed to minimising harmful emissions, waste and use of natural resources throughout our operations.
Specifically, we aim to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by an average of 2.5% per head annually, consistent with globally recognised reduction commitments and our own ambitions for a safer world. And our ambition to advance our environmental targets and practices means we will keep them under review throughout this strategy period.
Cutting through the noise
As isolationism and hostility to media threaten progress, our communications will focus on increasing informed influence and citizen agency. We will take an ambitious approach to engagement and listening – building our communities, strengthening current relationships, creating new connections, increasing media presence, sharing what we know – all with a view to making a difference on issues that matter.
Partners remain at the core of our strategy, and as IIED will be bolder and louder, we will support our partners to gain the same visibility. Closer audience targeting and nurturing greater presence on key issues will build our influence by placing our research in the right hands at the right time.
Meeting the challenges
Our world's gravest problems call for imaginative solutions. We cannot achieve a fairer future when those who have contributed least to our planet's crisis suffer most, yet are denied influence on the global stage. So we will focus our energies where IIED can have greatest effect, making sure those who are excluded from decision making can gain greater agency
IIED works at the intersection of social and environmental justice – where poverty reduction meets climate action; where the preservation of the natural world meets the need to protect local natural resource rights underpinning thriving communities.
We have identified five global challenges that we will address in our work: increasing inequality, the climate crisis, an assault on the natural world, increasing urban risk, and unsustainable markets.
These challenges are linked; so are the actions we will take to drive change. As we take forward the work programmes outlined below, we will look for connections, synergies and lessons that enable us to enrich partnerships and deliver greater impact.
Select one of the five global challenges we have pinpointed below to see our priorities for action in that area over the next five years.
We will further develop this strategy over the next five years.
And by continually reviewing the changing policy and political environment, we will identify new issues to influence as well as specific opportunities where IIED can have powerful impact.
IIED Strategy 2019-2024
Download our strategy document
Related links
Make Change Happen podcast: exploring key issues in sustainable development