Story of our Beginning: Advocacy for enabling private sector partnership in Urban DRR

Cecial Adhikari - Consortium Manager, PRAGATI - Urban DRR Project

Public Private Partnership (PPP) is not straightforward to translate the concept into action. At start line of the 18 months project, we were optimistic of its achievability. Midway, we learnt that we need to rethink our approach and be pragmatic. Now while we approach to the finish line, there are still number of unanswered questions and unwoven complexities. As we reflected –we were asking ourselves, “do we really understand the private sector and how and why they will commit to the PPP for Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR)?” None of us could answer firmly and without umm...ahh...hmmm.

There was a complete silence in the room during the reflection event. But we had to start discussing not just to meet our project target but to unpack private sector engagements in urban DRR. “So what do we expect from the private sector?” we asked ourselves, “is it that the resilient private sector only contributes during the emergency response?” the answer was “No, so far it appears that the private sector contributes only during emergency response but their engagements beyond responds still needs to untwined”.…but can we be bit more specific, why would they be motivated”., “ahha, you know……I think…..” !!. the discussion went on to reflect our minor and major steps to engage private sector in urban DRR.

Such conversations at times challenges our understanding and approach of working with the private sector. The major discussions during the brainstorming evolved around – what is our expectations and are they pragmatic – have we done enough homework or researches – have we been able to understand – how would we make even more efforts for deeper understanding of their motivations and how will they get involved.

Following the rigorous discussions, we have been able to draft a comprehensive framework based on the experiences we gained from the interventions, various stocktaking, critical reflections and consultations. We are convinced that interesting project like this should always ensure adequate scope for comprehensive research and advocacy component. We had realized that appropriate communication strategy and products are amongst key tools to get the ideas heard and internalized by the private sector. We learnt that the implementation on a typical trademark of traditional development way or business as usual would not work this time around.  

We started planning to be more effective – a connector, may be. But the question was – how? – what would be our niche. As of now, we have identified that we as part of civil society, would be an effective bridge between the government and the private sector as these are the major pillars for running the society and the systems. We came up with the idea for creating a “Discussion Platform” where we could bring representatives from both the sectors to exchange their expectations, expertise and what they could offer.

We were excited observing the outcomes from the first discussion series in the municipality. We were then even more determined on our plan to take it at the national level with the high-level participation. These discussions at all levels were well received by the government and the private sector. For us – the discourse has started and shall be continued.  

We are connecting the dots around the effectiveness of our approach -  “Communication for Advocacy”. In fact, we were already being engaged on research and advocacy though it might not have been explicitly expressed during the preliminary phase. We need to continue our role being a bridge, investing on research thereby supporting the evidence-based advocacy.