From institutional coherence to country delivery – Reflections on UNCCD COP17 from IUCN’s Global Climate Change and Energy Transition Team Director, Ali Raza Rizvi

One message from the discussions was clear. Countries are not asking for another layer of international architecture. Much of the finance, technical expertise, knowledge and implementation capacity they need already exists.

The harder question is how easily they can bring those pieces together around a problem they are actually trying to solve.

Because those problems rarely arrive neatly separated.

A landscape does not experience climate change, biodiversity loss, land degradation, water stress and livelihood pressures separately.

A government trying to restore that landscape cannot always deal with them separately either.

Yet international support can still require countries to navigate different institutions, funding windows, planning processes, technical requirements and reporting systems—each entirely legitimate in its own right.

This creates a practical challenge that deserves more attention.

A country should not have to break an integrated development problem into separate institutional languages simply to access the support available to address it.

That, for me, is where the next phase of the synergies agenda becomes very practical.

The objective is not to erase the distinctions between the Rio Conventions, or between the institutions and financing mechanisms that support them. Their mandates matter. Dedicated expertise matters. Dedicated finance matters.

The challenge is to make those distinctions less burdensome at the point of delivery.

Can finance, technical expertise and partnerships be organised more easily around country priorities?

Can different plans and funding streams contribute to the same outcome without forcing governments to build a separate implementation machinery around each one?

And can coordination be judged not by how many institutions are around the table, but by whether it makes implementation simpler and more effective for countries?

That is a different test of coherence.

The ultimate measure of Rio synergies will not be how frequently the term appears in declarations or how elaborate the coordination arrangements become.

It will be whether countries find it easier to deliver.

A restored landscape.

A community better able to withstand drought.

A farmer whose livelihood becomes more resilient.

An investment that delivers simultaneously for land, climate, biodiversity and people.

This is also where Nature-based Solutions have particular value.

Their importance in the synergies discussion is not simply that they sit at the intersection of several global agendas. It is that they allow action to begin with a real place, ecosystem or community—and then connect the climate, biodiversity, land, water and livelihood outcomes around it.

In other words, integration begins with the problem rather than with the institutional boundary.

That distinction matters.

One thought from Ulaanbaatar has stayed with me:

The ecosystem is already rich. The question is whether it is functioning as an ecosystem.

The same can be said of the international system supporting countries.

There is no shortage of institutions, knowledge, initiatives, funds or partnerships. Many are doing valuable work.
But a collection of strong institutions does not automatically produce a coherent system.

Coherence appears in the connections between them—and, more importantly, in what those connections enable a country to do.

Perhaps that should be one of the tests as the Rio synergies discussion moves forward through the next stages of the triple-COP year:

Not simply whether institutions are coordinating better with one another, but whether countries experience the system as easier to navigate and more capable of responding to the problems they actually face.

Much of what is needed already exists.

The challenge is to make it work together around delivery.

Not synergy as an idea.

Synergy as the way we deliver.

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