Foundations for Change: How the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance is building ecosystems for advocacy – Lessons and case studies from Year 4 – World

1.0 Introduction

The goal of development funding has always been to improve the lives of the vulnerable. To improve the lives of the vulnerable beyond the project level, however, you need to engage in local, national, and global advocacy. The Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance (Alliance) is funding advocacy and community programming in parallel in a way that is not typical of development programming, providing an opportunity to understand how this work can be combined to maximize impact. By combining advocacy, community programming, and knowledge generation, the Alliance has successfully:

• Leveraged Alliance community projects to influence government investments in, and scaling of, resilience good practices;

• Linked and layered advocacy across scales to influence attention to, and financing for, local-level resilience needs;

• Supported communities, civil society, and local government with the knowledge, skills, and data to advocate for their needs; and

• Pioneered the provision of resilience data to inform and shape government decisionmaking.

This report — presenting lessons from Year 4 of Phase II of the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance — consists of a tip sheet and supporting case studies for conducting successful advocacy. We find that strategic advocacy, combined with evidence of local risk, needs, and ways forward, can support the uptake of new practices, approaches and policies that support local resilience. The tip sheet, drawn from reporting on what Alliance teams are doing and achieving, lays out the building blocks and tactics for advocacy for achieving significant changes in flood resilience policy, spending, and practice – the Alliance’s three objectives.

These case studies also illustrate how the teams delivering the work have evolved with the work. Not all of the teams showcased in these case studies began with the intent to conduct advocacy. For these teams, their stories show how development-focused work can deepen in impact when organizations are provided with both long program timeframes and the funding, flexibility, and collaborative environment needed to learn and adapt programs.