Interactive break out sessions
Session 1: Maintaining and building public support for development
Leaders and senior professionals explored emerging thinking on how to sustain and grow UK public support for international development. They shared ideas on:
- How to deepen our collective understanding of UK public perceptions of development so that we can communicate effectively
- Our learning about actively making the case for development against significant opposition, scepticism and competing priorities
- What our shared strategic vision and programme should be so that we can reach out to active and interested audiences
Session 2: Good, better, best? How can we prove and improve our value?
As our sector comes under increasing pressure to prove and improve the value of what we do, we need to be clear about who are we doing this for, why, and how. This session updated members on the Bond Effectiveness Framework and offered a chance to feed ideas into its development. How should we test it and what will it tell us? We also considered how it relates to the Bond Statement of Principles which will help us to promote and achieve best practice in organisational conduct in our network.
Session 3: Advocacy Leadership Forum
This leadership session provided an important opportunity to build and direct the momentum of UK civil society advocacy on international development. Six months into a new UK Government and a changed political map, and following the UN MDG Review Summit, what is our emerging programme of action to influence the UK Government to continue to improve its own policies and practice on international development? Internationally, how are UK NGOs playing our part as global civil society seeks to renew the struggle for justice and equity with a transformative agenda?
Session 4: Good practice in institutional and trust funding: the principles of good donorship and NGO grant management
Bond is developing good practice guidelines for donors and recipients of institutional and trust funds to determine the principles of good donorship and NGO grant management. Join us to debate these principles and discuss ways to promote the recommended good practices, both in our own organisations and to donors and trusts through Bond.
Session 5: The tip of the iceberg
As climate change has become recognised as a global problem with major implications for development and poverty alleviation, this session looked at the other planetary boundaries that are being breached and asks what efforts are needed to address other environmental problems. Through audience discussion, this session drew out what development NGOs can do to support best practice and how the interests of the world's poor can be better served by safeguarding natural systems and processes.
Session 6: Should we work ‘in, on or around' conflict and insecurity?
Effectively engaging with UK policy on conflict and security is crucial for the development and humanitarian sectors, but critically assessing and constructively responding to policy responses is difficult without a vision of what humanitarian assistance and longer term development is about in ‘fragile states'. This director level debate, relevant to all Bond members, explored the relationship between development, humanitarian assistance and peacebuilding to help develop strategic responses to conflict and security policy.
