Nature Positive Collaboration Hubs – Amplify Results

Most organizations approach Nature Positive action on a stand-alone basis. However, environmental issues and opportunities are mostly specific to a location rather than to a particular organization, and many organizations often impact the same location.

Independent action by one organization, however well intended, may be ineffective or even disastrous, depending on the actions of other organizations that impact the same location. Biodiversity can only be nurtured if organizations work together.

Going it alone also results in duplication and fragmentation of effort whereas collaboration enables results to be amplified and costs reduced through economies of scale and scope.

However, organizations find it difficult to collaborate to achieve environmental outcomes because the only mechanisms they have for collaborating are based on commercial relationships.  Even then, commercial collaboration mechanisms such as joint ventures often fail.

While all parties have a common interest in the success of a joint venture, each individual party often seeks to gain more for itself through freeloading off the others, shifting risk, doing side deals, or simply cheating.  Joint ventures also often become dominated by the most powerful party, to the detriment of other members.  As a result, many commercial collaborations either fail to achieve their objectives, become dysfunctional or just collapse.

To enable organizations to collaborate to achieve environmental sustainability goals and to avoid the pitfalls of the usual joint venture arrangements we run location-specific Nature Positive Collaboration Hubs. The objective of each Hub is to enable member organizations to achieve environmental results beyond those they could achieve acting independently – the whole is greater than the sum of the parts - through an eight-stage process.

The initial membership of the Hub may not include all the organizations that impact Nature in the given location, but as traction is gained in determining the baseline, understanding interactions, and delivering solutions it is likely that new impacts and new members will be identified.

Critically, as an independent party whose only interest in the Hub is in the achievement of its joint and individual objectives, we provide the “backbone” that enables different organizations to work together effectively and efficiently. Through our role as the Collaboration Integrity Office in each Hub we provide governance, day-to-day management, progress reporting, and transparency around individual and collective accountabilities.

We also use our proprietary collaborative problem solving and solution development process to develop innovative solutions. We then integrate and project manage their delivery. As part of this process and to support progress monitoring, we also provide mechanisms for the confidential aggregation and sharing of data between members.

Nature Positive Collaboration Hubs are built on a common architecture and use pre-defined processes which means they are quick to start and can be rapidly scaled to get better results faster. This also allows different Hubs to work together.