Resources

Holistic facilitation for participatory planning

<p class="dropcap">Facilitation is usually framed as a soft skill — a temperament, a knack for handling rooms full of opinions. This thesis argues for something more austere: facilitation as a design discipline, with its own materials, methods and ethics. The room is the medium. The agenda is the geometry. Who gets to speak, in what order, in what language, on whose chair — those are the load-bearing decisions.</p><p>Between 2021 and 2023 I facilitated, observed or designed roughly seventy participatory processes — community surveys in mountain villages, online workshops with cross-border project teams, scenario-planning days with municipal staff, listening campaigns with adolescents in Iraqi Kurdistan and the Italian Alps. None of them resembled each other. All of them ran the same four risks: extraction, exhaustion, exclusion, theatre.</p><h2>Four failures, one practice</h2><p>Extraction is the most familiar — communities are asked questions whose answers serve a proposal already half-written. Exhaustion is its quieter cousin: people show up, again, and nothing visibly changes. Exclusion is built into the room before anyone arrives: the time of day, the language of the slides, the assumption that everyone can read. Theatre is the most insidious — a participatory process that performs participation, then files the outputs and proceeds as planned.</p><p>A holistic facilitation practice tries to make each of these failures expensive. Expensive to dismiss; expensive to repeat. It does this through choices that look small until they accumulate: the chair arrangement; the question order; the language in which the invitation is written; the size of the cohort; the rhythm of breaks; whether food is shared; what gets written down and by whom; what is read back at the end.</p><blockquote>The agenda is the geometry. Who gets to speak, in what order, in what language, on whose chair — those are the load-bearing decisions.</blockquote><h2>Methods catalogue</h2><p>Chapters 3–5 of the thesis catalogue methods I have used, with notes on what they assume and what they cost. The catalogue is deliberately uneven — some methods get half a page, others ten — because that's the truth of the practice. Some tools are workhorses. Others are case-specific and beautiful and you may use them three times in a career.</p><p>What unites them is a willingness to take the room seriously as material. Not a stage for an outcome, but an instrument that produces the outcome. Whatever a participatory process "finds" was made — by the choices listed above — at least as much as it was discovered.</p><h2>Why this matters for cooperation work</h2><p>The thesis closes on the use of these methods inside international cooperation. Donors increasingly ask for "participatory" approaches. Practitioners increasingly know the right vocabulary. The risk is that the vocabulary substitutes for the work — that we stage participation rather than design it. The remedy is mundane: better tools, more honest evaluation, and a willingness to call out the four failures above when we see them, including in our own processes.</p><p class="note">This is an excerpt — the published volume runs to 140 pages including the methods catalogue, the case studies (Trails of Participation, Arbat Community Center, Armeno) and the bibliography. Available through Aracne Editrice.</p>

What sub-granting taught me about trust

<p class="dropcap">Across five years of moving small grants to local organisations in places where the next call for proposals never quite fits the reality on the ground, the most useful tool I built was not a contract template, a dashboard, or an audit-ready folder structure. It was the relationship.</p><p>That sentence makes operations people nervous, and rightly so. Relationships are not auditable. They do not scale linearly. They evaporate when the person who held them leaves the post. Every funder I have worked with would prefer a system that works without trust, because trust is the part of the work that cannot be procured.</p><p>And yet. Five years in Yemen, Iraq, the occupied Palestinian territories, Jordan, Lebanon and Tunisia, with two hundred and fifty grantees and eight million euros, has taught me that due diligence is a relationship. The forms are downstream of it. You can have a perfectly compliant filing cabinet and still be operating, in practice, on blind faith. Or you can have a thinner paper trail and a network of partners who will tell you, on a Tuesday at nine PM, that a project assistant has begun behaving strangely and they wanted you to know before the audit.</p><h2>What due diligence is, when you look closely</h2><p>Donor frameworks describe due diligence as a check — a one-time assessment performed at the moment of contracting. In practice, due diligence is a continuous relational labour. It is the WhatsApp message asking a partner how they are. It is the willingness to listen when the answer is complicated. It is the call you make before the call you have to make.</p><p>It is also — and this is the part that no donor framework captures — a question of who picks up the phone, in what language, at what hour. A sub-grant scheme run by people who only operate in English, during European business hours, on platforms a community-based organisation cannot reliably access, has already failed its due-diligence test before any contract is signed. The compliance documents will, regardless, look perfect.</p><blockquote>Compliance becomes a question of whether a partner trusts you enough to flag a problem before it becomes one. The paperwork follows. It always does.</blockquote><h2>The architecture of trust</h2><p>What we built at Oxfam Italia — across the schemes I designed for Yemen, Iraq, the oPt, Jordan, Lebanon and Tunisia — was not principally a system of controls. It was an architecture of trust, made operational. Multilingual by default, with calls and contracts and reporting templates available in English, French and Arabic. Tailored eligibility frameworks negotiated with country offices, not imposed by HQ. Direct technical support to applicants who asked for it. Networking events that let grantees meet each other and stop being islands. Evaluation frameworks designed to produce learning rather than ammunition.</p><p>The controls live underneath that architecture, not on top of it. The folder structure exists. The audit trails are clean. The financial reports reconcile. But these are the soil, not the harvest. What we are actually doing is making a community of practitioners feel that the money is theirs to use well — and that we will be standing alongside them if it goes wrong, rather than appearing as auditors when it does.</p><h2>What this asks of an operations function</h2><p>To run sub-granting this way, the operations function has to do something it is not used to doing: it has to slow down at the front of the process and speed up at the back. The front is where trust gets seeded — in the design of the call, the eligibility criteria, the language, the contracting workflow. The back is where trust gets tested — in the speed with which a flagged problem moves through the system to a human who can do something about it.</p><p>Most cooperation operations are wired the other way around. Fast at the front (the call goes out; partners scramble; signatures happen) and slow at the back (the problem report sits in a queue; the field office waits; the partner loses faith). The redesign required is not technical. It is a redistribution of attention.</p><h2>A note on what this is not</h2><p>None of the above is an argument for less compliance. The audit folders are real, the budgets are real, the reports are real, the OFAC checks are real and necessary. What the past five years has taught me is that compliance follows trust, not the other way around. A partner who trusts you sends you accurate reports faster. A partner who does not, sends you the report a funder wants — which is rarely the report a funder needs.</p><p>The implications for how we recruit, train and protect sub-granting officers are large. The implications for how funders evaluate our work are larger. Whether the sector can afford that reckoning is another question — but the question is overdue.</p>

Listening as an operations skill

<p class="dropcap">Between 2021 and 2023, in a small Piedmontese town above Lago d'Orta, I and a team of three coordinated something close to seven hundred and fifty conversations about a forest. We asked who used it, who avoided it, who was afraid of it, who managed it on paper and who managed it in practice. We did this with children, with the elderly, with hunters, with the local Youth Council, with the priest, with the mayor, with two sceptical foresters and one very generous woman who had grown up walking the same trails I was now walking.</p><p>The grant — €27,000 from MitOst's Civic Europe programme — was small. The administrative load, especially given the participatory methodology we'd promised, was disproportionate. By every metric an operations person is trained to care about, this was the wrong project to take on. I took it on, partly out of stubbornness, partly because I wanted to test whether the things I'd been doing professionally in Iraq and Tunisia and Yemen would work twenty kilometres from where I grew up.</p><h2>What I thought the project was about</h2><p>I thought the project was about youth participation in sustainable forest management. That phrase had been written into the proposal and approved by the donor and printed onto the t-shirts. The phrase was not wrong. But it was, I came to understand, downstream of something else.</p><p>The thing actually being negotiated, in those seven hundred and fifty conversations, was the question of who had the right to know what the forest was for. The forester thought the answer was obvious. The hunters thought it was obvious. The teenagers thought it was obvious, in a different direction. The priest had a third answer. The elderly had a fourth, which involved memory and was therefore taken less seriously by everyone.</p><blockquote>What I'd called "stakeholder analysis" was a description of a community's epistemic disagreements — about who knew the place, and how.</blockquote><h2>What I learned about listening</h2><p>Listening, when done well, is operationally expensive. It takes longer than you have budgeted. It produces information you did not request. It generates obligations — once a person has been listened to, they expect a return. None of these costs are accounted for in standard project budgets, and yet they determine whether the project's outputs will land or evaporate.</p><p>I think now that listening is to community work what reconciliation is to bookkeeping. Unglamorous, slow, mostly invisible, and the thing that actually determines whether the numbers mean anything. A project budget that does not include time for listening is a project budget that has externalised the cost of listening onto whichever team member is unlucky enough to care.</p><h2>What a forest taught a sub-granting officer</h2><p>Three things, mostly. First: the methods I had been deploying in MENA — calls for proposals, evaluation frameworks, learning loops — worked just as well, and just as imperfectly, on an Italian alpine path. The geography was a red herring. The challenge was the same: how do you design a process so that the people closest to a question can answer it without losing time, dignity, or their teenagers' patience?</p><p>Second: the thing I had been calling "stakeholder analysis" in donor reports was, properly understood, a description of a community's epistemic disagreements — about who knew the place, and how. Once I stopped flattening that into a list of names and started letting it stay a disagreement, the project moved.</p><p>Third: it is possible to apply humanitarian operations methods to small Italian communities without being either condescending or absurd. The trick is to drop the vocabulary and keep the postures. Show up. Listen for longer than feels efficient. Return the listening as something useful. Do not pretend the work is finished when the grant closes.</p><p>Trails of Participation closed in 2023, and the Youth Council still meets. The mayor still takes my calls. The forester is still sceptical, which is correct of him. The forest, helpfully, is indifferent to all of us — which is the part of this story that keeps me honest.</p>

Volunteers in Europe's refugee response

<p class="dropcap">Between October 2018 and April 2019, with United Nations Volunteers HQ and in partnership with UNHCR, we conducted a four-country mapping study of volunteer organisations active in Europe's response to the refugee and migrant situation. The countries were chosen for their contrast: France and Sweden as long-standing receiving contexts; Hungary as an example of a hostile political climate constraining civil society; Spain as a maritime-arrival context with rapid civic mobilisation.</p><h2>Methodology</h2><p>The study combined a quantitative survey of 187 volunteer organisations with qualitative interviews of 42 organisational leaders and roughly 60 volunteers themselves. We designed the methodology to allow cross-country comparison without flattening contextual difference — a hard balance, and one we did not always strike. The instrument was developed in consultation with the four country teams over a six-week period and translated into four working languages.</p><p>The methodological annex (Chapter 7 of the full report) details the survey instrument, the interview protocols, the sampling logic and the limitations. Two limitations deserve flagging here: the sample skewed toward formally registered organisations, and we under-represented refugee-led volunteer initiatives. Both are areas where follow-up work is needed.</p><h2>What we found</h2><p>Three findings stand out across the four countries. First, the volunteer response was substantially larger than national authorities acknowledged — by an order of magnitude, in some areas. Second, volunteer organisations were doing protection work for which they were neither funded nor trained, with predictable consequences for both volunteers and the people they were trying to support. Third, the relationship between volunteer organisations and statutory services was poorly designed in all four contexts, with each side under-investing in the coordination architecture that would have made both more effective.</p><blockquote>Volunteer organisations were doing protection work for which they were neither funded nor trained — with predictable consequences for everyone involved.</blockquote><h2>What we recommended</h2><p>The recommendations (Chapter 6) were directed at three audiences. To UNV and UN partners: invest in formal cooperation mechanisms with volunteer organisations, including in countries where statutory services prefer the volunteer sector remain informal. To national authorities: stop treating volunteer organisations as an inconvenience and start treating them as a coordination partner with reciprocal obligations. To volunteer organisations themselves: invest in protection training, safeguarding policies, and the unglamorous infrastructure that allows volunteer-driven services to scale without harming either volunteers or the people they serve.</p><p>The report was published internally in mid-2019 and circulated to country teams and partners. A condensed public summary is available; the full text is accessible to researchers on request.</p><p class="note">This is the public-facing summary. The full report (62 pages) includes the country-by-country chapters, the methodology annex and the recommendations matrix.</p>

Curriculum Vitae