Summary:

Enhancing governance and strengthening advocacy for policychange of large Collective Impact initiatives

Nutrition issues are increasingly being addressed through global partnerships andmulti‐sectoral initiatives. Ensuring effective governance of these initiatives is instru-mental for achieving large‐scale impact. The Collective Impact (CI) approach is aninsightful framework that can be used to guide and assess the effectiveness of thisgovernance. Despite the utility and widespread use of this approach, two gaps areidentified: a limited understanding of the implications of expansion for an initiativeoperating under the conditions of CI and a lack of attention to advocacy for policychange in CI initiatives. In this paper, a case study was undertaken in which the CI lenswas applied to the advocacy efforts of Alive & Thrive (A&T), UNICEF and partners.The initiative expanded into a regional movement and achieved meaningful policychanges in infant and young child feeding policies in seven countries in SoutheastAsia. These efforts are examined in order to address the two gaps identified in theCI approach. The objectives of the paper are (a) to examine the governance of thisinitiative and the process of expansion from a national to a regional, multilayered ini-tiative, with attention to challenges, adaptations, and key elements, and (b) to com-pare advocacy in the A&T–UNICEF initiative and in typical CI initiatives and gaininsight into how the practice of advocacy for policy change can be strengthened inCI initiatives.

Authors: Michaud‐Létourneau, I; Gayard, M; Mathisen, R; Phan, LTH; Weissman, A; Pelletier DP.

Journal: Matern Child Nutr. 2019;15(S2):e12728.