Power with: Our journey to Gender, Climate and Social Justice
The idea of good governance, in which institutions are effective, accountable and inclusive at all levels is an important part of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 16 (SDG). What’s more, the commitment to ‘leave no one behind’ is a cross-cutting feature of all SDGs. But we are committing to do much more than this.
At Integrity Action, we passionately believe in the idea that ‘no goal should be met unless it is met for everyone’. We have extensively considered what this statement means for us and concluded that rather than talking about inclusion we need to be speaking about justice. Our new Power with approach puts an emphasis on shared power, rooted in respect, solidarity, and collaborative decision-making, and on fostering collective action rather than domination and control.
Applying this approach means:
- Working with partners to support locally-led and justice-based agendas and solutions. We will listen to what our monitors, partners and the communities we work for have to say, act on their recommendations and continuously improve our initiatives. We have devised this Gender, Climate and Social Responsiveness Scale to assess our initiatives.
- Working as a team to increase diversity among staff and trustees, and to eliminate any injustice we identify in our systems and practices.
- Collaborating with fellow organisations to re-imagine the global development sector, including contributing to decolonising the sector and shifting the power and resources that we hold towards the communities we work for and the civil society organisations based where our projects are located.
Our dedicated Power with approach sets out our promises in this area in more detail. We will be accountable for the promises that we make by publicly reporting on our achievements, challenges, lessons learnt and adaptations every year.