8 Lessons from the UN's Innovation Journey
Over the past decade or so, innovation and systems thinking have been embedded around the UN development system. From labs to foresight to systems change, nearly every major agency has adopted frameworks inspired by design thinking, futures analysis, and adaptive delivery. This movement has enabled experimentation, opened doors to new actors, and helped modernize the UN’s internal practices.
But there are two diverging trajectories for this trend:
A) Advancing genuinely transformative development policies by framing them in neutral, depoliticized terms, where they otherwise wouldn't be tolerated.
B) Privatizing public decision-making and enabling a technocratic capture of development policy spaces.
Facing geopolitical headwinds and budget crunches, innovation and systems approaches could be vital to the UN's future and even survival. But the UN and wider development sector could consider some lessons from recent experience as it approaches this fork in the road:
1. Innovation as a Bland Legitimacy
One reason innovation frameworks gained such wide traction across the UN system and its partners is their capacity to act as a convergent language, connecting otherwise divergent actors. Conservative donors, private investors, technocratic ministries, and cautious politicians could all agree on the vocabulary of “innovation ecosystems” or “adaptive systems change,” even when underlying interests remained conflicted.
This consensus-building function helped stabilize cooperation across ideological divides. But it also reframed development challenges in ways that were generally non-contentious, focusing on process improvement and behavioral insights rather than structural conflict or distributional questions.
2. Incubator for Technocracy
As UN agencies professionalized their policy advisory work—offering delivery labs, innovation toolkits, and strategy design sprints—they increasingly adopted methods originating in the management consulting industry. UN agencies have partnered directly with firms like EY, Deloitte or BCG to co-design services or internal reforms.
This raised an unexpected dynamic: the UN, while competing with global consultancies for influence in development cooperation, simultaneously helped normalize their techniques and language across the public sector globally. This may have contributed to some Southern governments increasingly opting for private-sector advisory contracts. The UN has become a source and casualty of a growing market for technocratic governance.
3. Injustice as Feature, not Bug
One strength of systems thinking is its ability to map complexity and dynamic interconnections. At its best, this framing can be deftly used as a novel way to leverage policies towards genuine inclusion and structural transformation.
But those cases tend to be the exceptions. It is difficult to deploy innovation tools within highly political contexts. Flowery, motivational abstractions can be easily co-opted as a cover for structural amnesia: displacing attention from - rather than focusing on - power dynamics. When complex political struggles are rendered as ecosystem dynamics or leverage points, it risks letting conflict, exclusion, collective grievances and extractive social conditions be presented as design flaws or system bugs rather than deliberate outcomes of institutions and incumbent powers.
4. Innovation Theatre
Innovation has served as a reputational asset for governments and donors, particularly those seeking to modernize their image without pursuing deeper reforms. Co-branding with UN innovation initiatives offers a way to signal responsiveness and progress (or 'future-orientation’), even when policy environments remained exclusive and extractive.
This dynamic is not necessarily insidious, but it does complicate assumptions about innovation as inherently neutral problem solving. The innovation frame may, at times, function more as symbolic capital for entrenched interests that skews incentives.
5. Investor Confidence Overriding Local Ownership
One reason innovation and systems approaches gained strong support from donor finance ministries and multilateral institutions is their alignment with investor-friendly rationales. By emphasizing measurement, risk calculation, and cost-efficiency, these frameworks made development processes more legible to financial markets and development banks.
As development finance is pivoting towards private sources, it is more urgent to meaningfully capture societal-level change, accountability, equity, and long-term public interest in standardized metrics. This means overhauling UN donors' PRINCE2-heavy results based management, logframes and M&E assumptions. Without shifting the incentives and accountability focus of development to these outcomes, these marginal experiments around transformative approaches will remain just that: experimental and marginal, forever tied to siloed, project-level outputs. Without shifting these underlying incentives, a centralised, muted innovation regime can only provide a soft global infrastructure for flat, homogeneous development innovation that overpowers local political, fiscal and regulatory systems.
6. From Solidarity to Portfolio Logic
Another aspect of this shift in development logic is from universal service management toward portfolio management. UN programs have increasingly adopted the language of “portfolios of change,” “learning loops,” and “continuous experimentation.”
This offers greater flexibility in volatile contexts, some ability to absorb new approaches, tools and technologies, and perhaps opens doors for partnerships that would otherwise stay firmly closed, both politically and financially. The risk is, without changes to the underlying financing and governance logic as above, it may also be pushing a normative shift in development management. Moving from building rights-based distributive systems to instead managing scarcity and volatility will limit the UN’s capacity to champion local policy spaces and collective bargaining for development priorities.
7. Local Innovation Gig Economies
Innovation platforms frequently position local knowledge, youth ideas, social entrepreneurs, and grassroots insights as valuable inputs to global policy design. Yet the architecture of these platforms haven't changed the underlying centralized decision-making and funding control. The UN convenes, curates, and channels local innovation but ownership of resources and agenda-setting often remains with international partners.
This reflects a broader pattern of intellectual and institutional asymmetry: while local actors supply legitimacy and creativity, the utility, recognition and monetization of this value often accrues at global level. This mirrors the global gig economy’s dynamics of exploitation cloaked as opportunity, reinforcing a new intellectual division of labor where innovation is extracted from the periphery and valorized at the core.
8. Scalability in a Fragmented World
Many UN innovation efforts have been shaped by a foundational assumption: that successful pilots can be scaled, replicated, transferred, industrialized. This belief underpins many lab models, challenge funds, and digital interventions. A shift to a 'design-at-scale' model, for more strategic-level, upstream policy innovation portfolios has emerged in recent years. Yet as crises become more fragmented, plural, and geographically specific, scalability still may not always lead to sustainability. The pursuit of scalable or at-scale solutions can divert attention and resources from deeper, locally-rooted institutional development. Development cooperation can deploy systems analysis to support enabling environments for locally-led transformation, rather than pushing its own innovative solutions.
Holding on to what works
The UN faces budgetary collapse, geopolitical turmoil, and rising demands for scrutiny and legitimacy. It'd be unsurprising if the innovation agenda now takes centre stage: a technocratic, seemingly neutral and private sector-friendly framework. Its tools and principles will be useful but the UN risks undermining itself without a sensible, coherent strategy that is politically aware and institutionally embedded.
We need a clear understanding how these tools have functioned within broader political economies, whose interests they have served, and how their uptake reflects evolving relationships between global cooperation, state institutions, capital, and local struggles for sustainable development.
For development practitioners and UN agencies, a structural reading of where these innovation trends have taken us could be the basis for a more streetwise, self-assured innovation practice of solidarity.
