Review of World Resources Institute Strategic Plan 2018-2022

In March 2021, OpenCities together with Agulhas were selected to undertake a strategic assessment of the World Resources Institute’s progress in implementing its 2018-2022 Strategic Plan as well as an in-depth review of its Africa strategy.  WRI is one of the world’s leading environment and development organizations with a staff of over 1500 people.

The 2018-2022 Strategic Plan seeks to address seven “Global Challenges” relating to: Food, Forests, Water, Energy, Sustainable Cities, Climate, and Oceans (adopted at the outset of the current Strategic Plan). These Challenges are all, individually and jointly, profoundly significant for the health of the planet. Key to the 2018-2022 Strategic Plan is WRI’s “Count It, Change It, Scale It” approach which aims to address the political and financial barriers, psychological inertia, vested interests, and outdated infrastructure that are major barriers to progress.

The Review covered work undertaken by WRI’s Programs, Centers, International Offices, Delivery Platforms, and Core Functions. It included an assessment of the integration of the cross-cutting themes of poverty, gender, and social equity within WRI’s work. The ER also included an in-depth review of the Africa strategy. To address the ER questions, the team collected data using a range of instruments and used the data in combination where possible, to ensure that inferences from the data, and responses to the Review Questions, were as robust as possible:

·       Document Review: We reviewed multiple WRI documents, including team strategies, annual plans and the Progress Against 5-Year Strategy documents, which comprise targets and indicators on desired outcomes, using an adapted version of a World Bank methodology.

·       Interviews: We conducted semi-structured interviews with 59 WRI staff and 4 Board members. We also conducted 40 semi-structured interviews with individuals external to WRI including: (i) Donors (9); (ii) NGOs/CSOs (9); (iii) Private Sector (5); (iv) Multilaterals (5); and (v) Policymakers (12).

·       Focus Group Discussions: We conducted 11 internal Focus Group Discussion(s) (FGD) involving 104 people and 1 external FGD with francophone stakeholders in Africa.

·       All-Staff Survey: We designed and distributed a confidential all-staff survey via SurveyMonkey to gather perspectives on the Review Questions. The survey received 520 responses, which amounted to an effective response rate of 33%.

In their response to the report, WRI CEO Ani Dasgupta said: ‘We are grateful to OpenCities + Agulhas for conducting the independent External Review (ER) of the World Resources Institute (WRI) between April and November 2021. We deeply appreciate the way in which the review team engaged with our staff, partners and donors, and for the rigorous methodology they applied to develop an evidenced-based understanding of our network, approach and results to assess progress against our current 2018-2022 Strategic Plan.’