Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent visit to the United Arab Emirates revealed New Delhi’s intention to bolster bilateral relations with the Gulf states. It was the first visit by an Indian prime minister in over 30 years, demonstrating the country’s renewed focus on expanding ties with the region it has always called “West Asia.” Although India and the Middle East share a long history of trade, immigration and cultural exchange, relations have yet to reach their full potential.

Read "Dealing with Delhi: How culture shapes India’s Middle East policy"

In this policy briefing, Kadira Pethiyagoda highlights the importance of an under-reported aspect of the relationship – culture. The author explains the role it plays in India’s policies toward the region, particularly under the current government, and argues that Gulf states need to understand the impact of Indian values and identity. Pethiyagoda provides recommendations on how the Gulf states can, through better understanding the cultural drivers of Indian foreign policy, build stronger ties with India, thereby advancing both economic and strategic interests.

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In 2011, Libya’s revolution knocked most of its oil production offline for months, resulting in a loss of nearly 2 percent of global production and a corresponding increase in oil prices. The security of energy exports and energy transit from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, given its paramount importance to the global economy, has long been a concern. The current, very unsettled political situation in the region has made that concern even more salient.

Read "Risky Routes: Energy Transit in the Middle East"

In a new Brookings Doha Center Analysis Paper, Robin Mills identifies the key points of vulnerability in MENA energy supply and transit, including the pivotal Strait of Hormuz and a number of important pipelines. Mills also assesses the impact of possible disruptions on both the global economy and MENA states themselves.

Mills argues that to mitigate such disruptions, infrastructural, institutional, and market approaches must be used together. Mills highlights the need for improved assessments of the viability of various infrastructure projects and calls for the development of regional institutional arrangements that can better manage transit crises as they arise.

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America is becoming a more class-stratified society, contrary to the nation’s self-image as a socially dynamic meritocracy. In particular, the barriers are hardening between the upper middle class and the majority below them. As New York Times contributor Tom Edsall writes (“How the Other Fifth Lives"), “The self-segregation of a privileged fifth of the population is…creating a self-perpetuating class at the top, which is ever more difficult to break into.”

This separation of the upper middle class by income, wealth, occupation and neighborhood has created a social distance between those of us who have been prospering in recent decades, and those who are feeling left behind, angry and resentful, and more like to vote for To-Hell-With-Them-All populist politicians. As I told Charles Homans, also writing on class for the Times, “The upper middle class are surprised by the rise of Trump. The actual middle class is surprised we’re surprised.”

Edsall cited my earlier essay, “The Dangerous Separation of the American Upper Middle Class,” and quoted me as follows:

“The top fifth have been prospering while the majority lags behind. But the separation is not just economic. Gaps are growing on a whole range of dimensions, including family structure, education, lifestyle, and geography. Indeed, these dimensions of advantage appear to be clustering more tightly together, each thereby amplifying the effect of the other.”

Just as certain disadvantages can cluster together, creating multidimensional poverty, so advantages may cluster together, resulting in multidimensional advantage. Is there more clustering of advantages at the top of American society? Yes.

The top fifth of households by income obviously have more money than the 80 percent below them. What about other advantages? Let’s take just three: marriage, employment and education. (See Sean Reardon and Kendra Bischoff’s paper on the geographical segregation of affluence). You would expect people in top-quintile households to be more likely to have a graduate or professional degree; to have two earners in the family; and perhaps also to be married. You would be right.

The difference in the proportion of the top fifth with each of these other advantages compared to the bottom four-fifths is around 20 percentage points (we restrict our analysis to those aged 40-50). For example, in 1979 a forty-something year-old in the top income quintile was about 6 percentage points more likely to be married that one in the bottom 80 percent. Now the gap is 17 percentage points.

This is hardly surprising. More education and more earners in the home will increase the chances that you make it into the top quintile for your age cohort. But it is noteworthy that the extent to which these different dimensions of advantage overlap has been steadily increasing over time. Along with the increased association between top-quintile income and marriage, the differentials for graduate education and two-earner status have each increased by around 10 percentage points between 1979 and 2014.

Particularly striking is the increase in the “marriage gap” between the upper middle class and the rest. This is an important factor in the transmission of class status to the next generation, since married couples are more likely to stay together, and stable families predict better outcomes for children.

Similarly, the adults with high levels of education are likely to raise children who end up towards the top of the educational distribution. In fact, the intergenerational persistence of education is even greater than of income, as some of our earlier work shows (“The Inheritance of Education”). Almost half (46 percent) the children of parents in the top education quintile end up in the top education quintile themselves. Three in four (76 percent) stayed in one of the top two education quintiles.

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said: "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.” Ernest Hemingway’s later response was: “Yes, they have more money.” Today what separates the rich from the rest is not just money, but family life, education, zip code, and so on. This is a point made by a number of scholars, including recently both Robert Putnam in Our Kids and Charles Murray in Coming Apart. Our empirical analysis confirms that different kinds of advantage are increasingly overlapping with each other.

The framing of inequality in terms of social class used to feel distinctly un-American. No longer.

Editor’s note: This piece originally appeared in Real Clear Markets.

Politicians and scholars often lament the persistence of poverty across generations. But affluence persists, too. In the U.S. especially, the top of the income distribution is just as “sticky”, in intergenerational terms, as the bottom. The American upper middle class is reproducing itself quite effectively.

Class reproduction is of course driven by a whole range of factors, from parenting and family structure through formal education, informal learning, the use of social networks, and so on. Some are unfair: playing the legacy card in college admissions, securing internships via closed social networks, zoning out lower-income families from our neighborhoods and school catchment areas. (These “opportunity hoarding” mechanisms are the focus of my forthcoming book, Dream Hoarders.)

It is natural and laudable for parents to want their children to prosper. It is also understandable that they’ll use the resources and means at their disposal to try to reduce the chances of their children being downwardly mobile. They are likely to try even harder if the drop looks big, in economic terms.

There is a significant earnings gap between those at the top and those in the middle. But this gap is much bigger in the U.S. than in other nations, and is getting bigger over time:

The cost of falling reflects the particular way in which income inequality has risen in recent years: namely, at the top of the distribution. The relationship between income inequality and intergenerational mobility is a much-disputed one, as regular readers of this blog know well. Overall, the evidence for a “Great Gatsby Curve” is quite weak.

But at the top of the distribution, there could be some incentive effects linking inequality and immobility. As the income gap has widened at the top, the consequences of falling out of the upper middle class have worsened. So the incentives of the upper middle class to keep themselves, and their children, up at the top have strengthened. It looks like a long drop, because it is.

Upper middle class Americans do seem worried. In 2011, while around half of American adults making less than $30,000 per year agreed that “today’s children will lead a better life than their parents,” only 37 percent of those making $75,000 or more were as optimistic.

The greater spending of upper middle class parents on “enrichment activities” is well known; recent evidence suggests the Great Recession did nothing to reduce it. American upper middle class parents are desperate to secure their children a high position on the earnings ladder. This makes sense, given the consequences of downward mobility for their economic fortunes. Inequality incentivizes opportunity hoarding, which reduces social mobility. Time, perhaps, to lower the stakes a little?

The confluence of the agreement on 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs, or Global Goals) in 2015, and the increased attention being paid to the role of non-traditional actors in contributing to shared prosperity, provide a unique opportunity to focus attention on attempts to identify promising new solutions to the barriers that impede the full development of the world’s youngest citizens. Current estimates indicate that 200 million children globally under the age of 5 are at risk of not reaching their development potential. With these goals, the global community has a tremendous opportunity to change the course of history. There is evidence that certain early childhood development (ECD) interventions—spanning the nutrition, health, water and sanitation, education, social protection, and governance sectors from conception to age 5—have high potential to help to achieve the SDGs related to child development. Furthermore, early childhood interventions have been found to improve adult health and education levels, reduce crime, and raise employment rates, which will be paramount to achieving global economic, climate, and physical security.

Impact bonds have the potential to address some of the main financing and delivery constraints faced in ECD. By providing upfront private capital, impact bonds could help to address service provider liquidity constraints and leverage public capital by allowing the government to connect preventive programs with future benefits to individuals, society, and the economy. Impact bonds also have the potential to drive performance management, support monitoring and evaluation, and create accountability, which all help to address quality and capacity constraints. By fostering innovation, experimentation and adaptive learning in service delivery, cost-effective solutions could be identified through impact bonds. By producing evidence of outcome achievement, impact bonds could shift the focus toward effective ECD programs. Finally, collaboration across stakeholders—a necessary component of impact bonds—has the potential to allow for alignment of interests and a win-win situation for investors, outcome funders, and program beneficiaries alike.

The high participation of non-state actors and potentially significant returns in ECD make it a promising sector for impact bonds. Unlike other services that may have entrenched interests, the multitude of agencies and non-state entities financing and providing ECD services potentially allows for more experimentation. The preventive nature of ECD programs also fits well with the core feature of SIBs, which is that preventive investments will result in valuable short- and potentially long-term outcomes. There is evidence that ECD interventions can have immense effects on later-life outcomes. For example, a longitudinal study of a program in Jamaica, in which participants received weekly visits from community health workers over a 2-year period, was found to increase the earnings of participants by 25 percent, 20 years later.

There may, however, be some particular challenges associated with applying impact bonds in the ECD sector. Impact bonds (and other Payment by Results mechanisms tied to outcomes) require meaningful outcomes that are measureable within a timeframe that is reasonable to the outcome funder (and investors in the case of an impact bond). Meaningful outcomes are outcomes that are intrinsically or extrinsically valuable. Intrinsically valuable outcomes that are measureable within a reasonable timeframe could be extrinsically valuable if they are proxies for long-term benefits to individuals, society, or the economy. The delay between ECD interventions and later-life results may prove an impediment in some cases. By identifying appropriate interim measures such as language development, socioemotional development, and schooling outcomes that may proxy for desirable longer-term outcomes, the issue of delay could be mitigated. For example, there is evidence that early stimulation and health programs can have statistically significant effects on schooling outcomes in the short-run. An increase in focus on the intrinsic value of short-term outcomes that result from ECD interventions, such as child survival, is also important.

As the global community moves beyond the Millennium Development Goals to a set of Global Goals and associated targets linked to measurable outcomes, there is an opportunity to demonstrate a commitment to invest in future generations. Leveraging upfront funding, focusing on outcomes through adaptive learning and testing new ways to deliver early childhood interventions more effectively are all means of achieving the ECD-related goals. Despite the hype around all of the new financing mechanisms, the keys to creating high-quality, locally appropriate programs remains simple—real-time collection of outcome data, the freedom to fail, and the flexibility to course-adjust. In some circumstances social service provision based on outcomes and adaptive learning may require mechanisms like impact bonds or other Payment by Results mechanisms. In other circumstances it may not. As this very nascent field continues to grow, more research will be needed to capture lessons learned, contextualize them within the larger landscape of ECD financing and service provision, and apply them to real-world social challenges with the world’s youngest and most disadvantaged populations at the forefront of the conversation. 

Read the previous report on the landscape of impact bonds across sectors and geography »

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March 18 was an historic day for early childhood development (ECD) financing—the Departments of Social Development and Health of the Western Cape province of South Africa committed 25 million rand ($1.62 million) in outcome funding for three social impact bonds (SIBs) for maternal and early childhood outcomes. This is the first ever funding committed by a middle-income government for a SIB—to date no low-income country governments have participated in a SIB either—making South Africa’s choice to pioneer this new path especially exciting.

A SIB is a financing mechanism for social outcomes where investors provide upfront capital for services and a government agency repays investors contingent on outcome achievement. There are currently two active development impact bonds or DIBs (where a donor provides outcome funding rather than a government agency) in middle-income countries, one for coffee production in Peru and one for girls’ education in India. The South African SIBs, whose implementation was facilitated by the Bertha Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Cape Town and Social Finance U.K. as well as other organizations, will be the first impact bonds in Africa.

We have been following closely the development of these SIBs over the last two years through our research on the potential applications of impact bonds for ECD outcomes, and recently hosted a discussion on the topic at Brookings. There are currently nine other impact bonds worldwide that include outcomes for children ages 0 to 5, including two recently announced impact bonds in the U.S. for nurse home-visiting in South Carolina and support for families struggling with substance abuse in Connecticut.

Impact bonds are well suited to fund interventions that have high potential returns to society; that require learning, adaptability, and combinations of services to achieve those returns; and that are not core government-funded services (often resulting in a relative proliferation of non-state providers). In our recent report, we find that a majority of evaluations show ECD can have unparalleled returns, but there are also a number of evaluations that show no significant impact or where impact fades out. Overall however, there are few evaluations relative to the number of service providers and interventions, an indication of how little we know about the effectiveness of the majority of service providers. For example, there are only 15 studies examining the effects of ECD interventions in low- and middle-income countries on later-life socioemotional development, which has been shown to be a critical determinant of success in school and life.

The case for government investment is strong, but continuous learning and adaptation is needed to ensure the high potential impacts are achieved. Tying payments to outcomes could help the ECD sector in three ways: it could encourage new government investment in ECD, it could encourage performance management and adaptability, and, crucially, it could help develop the knowledge base of what works in ECD. Unlike some other sectors where providers are able to finance their own operations to participate in a results-based (performance-based) contract through fees or other cash flows, ECD providers will almost always require upfront capital in order to reach the most vulnerable. Consequently, we find that, despite some significant challenges, ECD interventions are particularly well suited to impact bonds.

For this reason, there are three things we find particularly exciting about these new SIBs for early childhood development in South Africa:

1. Collaboration of two departments to ensure a continuity of outcome measurement and, hopefully, achievement. Given their different mandates, the Department of Health will fund outcomes for pregnant mothers and children in their first 1,000 days and the Department of Social Development will fund outcomes for children ages 2 to 5. The Bertha Centre writes that “the funding will be made available to three community based organizations working with pregnant women and children up to five years of age with outcomes including improved antenatal care, prevention of mother to child transmission of HIV, exclusive breastfeeding, a reduction in growth stunting, and improved cognitive, language and motor development.” 

The continuity of quality services is essential to sustaining the impacts of early childhood services, and this is the first set of impact bonds to address outcomes across the development spectrum from age 0 to 5. Selecting outcomes however, particularly for more complex learning outcomes for children ages 3 to 5, can be one of the greatest challenges for impact bonds in the ECD sector.

A full list of recommended outcome metrics for ECD impact bonds is available in our report.

2. Outcome fund structure. The SIBs in South Africa have been designed as impact bond funds, where the outcome funder issues a rate card of prices it is willing to pay for certain outcomes and multiple service providers are awarded contracts to provide those outcomes. This structure, which has been implemented in four instances in the U.K., could help facilitate impact bonds at greater scale than what we have seen thus far.

At the Brookings event on impact bonds, Louise Savell of Social Finance U.K., explained that scale was critical in the South African case because there are few providers that work across the entire province. While the discussion around pricing outcomes in the U.K. was more focused on future value to the economy, the discussion in South Africa had to be more attuned to the price of providing services. These delivery prices differ greatly by township, which may result in different outcome payment prices by township. The impact bond designers also had to ensure the outcome price allowed for providers to serve the hardest to reach.

3. Matching of private-sector outcome funds. This is the first impact bond to date where private-sector actors will augment outcome funds, in addition to serving as investors. Impact bonds take a great deal of work for a government agency to establish—though it will likely drop over time—and additional or matching of outcome funds will be critical to making this effort worthwhile for low- and middle-income country governments.

Looking forward, it will be interesting to compare and contrast the structure and design of these SIBs with the impact bonds for ECD outcomes in Cameroon, India, and potentially other countries as they launch in the coming years. Each impact bond must be designed taking into consideration the particular issues and challenges in a given context. However, sharing learnings from one impact bond to the next will likely improve both efficiency and quality of the impact bond implementation. 

Editors’ Note: In a recent interview with Foreign Policy Interrupted, Tamara Wittes was asked about how the situation in the Middle East has changed since she published her 2008 book Freedom’s Unsteady March. Five years after the Arab uprisings and the start of the Syrian civil war, and a year and a half after the Islamic State captured Mosul (along with the world’s attention), Tamara says that many of the same fundamental dynamics in the Middle East are still at work.

The situation in the region has changed so dramatically since then, but I think that the fundamental insights that informed that book remain true. The underlying drivers of change in the Middle East are still there in terms of the demographic drivers, the economic drivers, the technological drivers that I described in the book; they are all still present.

Although there’s a lot of disorder and a lot of violence, and that leads people on the ground to prioritize security and to search for security in different ways, that doesn’t mean that they’re going to be satisfied. It doesn’t mean that the, “well, at least it’s not ISIS” line is going to suffice for governments in the Middle East for very long.

The underlying drivers of change are still present, the pressure for change is still present, and a lot of those pressures are about the simple fact of individual empowerment. Expectations shifted, and people, individuals, have the ability to act in ways that they didn’t before. States and governments have to accommodate that. It’s affecting politics all over the world, and the Middle East is not immune.

So the question becomes: how are governments going to learn to accommodate that and turn it into a strength? I think that the United States does have a really important role to play there. There were mistakes that the Bush administration made—setting aside his vision of Iraq, which has of course been very thoroughly discussed and assessed. But even in terms of non-military intervention to try to advance reform, the critique I made in the book is that the Bush administration was overly focused on political process and elections in particular. I think that one of the other lessons that has come of recent years is that the United States and other Western countries get very focused on political institutions and think, well, if we set up a judicial system, and we set up a parliament, and a constitution, then the gears in the machine sort of start to turn, the states start to function. Look at the rebuilding efforts in Afghanistan, for example.

But what we see in the Middle East today is that formal institutions aren’t enough. People have to have trust in the institutions, and people and communities have to have sufficient agreement on the basic rules of the game to make those institutions legitimate and authoritative. And that’s what’s missing in a lot of places around the region right now, that there isn’t enough dialogue and debate and ultimately negotiated agreement on the basic rules of the game. So I think that the challenge for the United States and others who care about stability in the Middle East going forward is how to help cultivate platforms for that kind of dialogue, and how to help cultivate the skills and the mechanisms for resolving very fundamental questions about how government should be organized and what should be the role of religion and politics, and what’s the balance between individual rights and collective identity.

These are big, big, questions, and right now, in too many places, they are being fought over violently. But the questions still have to be answered, and so the challenge is helping develop ways to do that, to do it peacefully.

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With the violence in the Middle East continuing, and further attacks on American soil in the name of Islam, the election campaigns have paid significant attention to policy issues related to the Middle East. But as both Republicans and Democrats prepare for their national conventions, how do Americans prioritize Middle East issues compared with other global priorities? Have public attitudes shifted in light of recent ISIS-inspired attacks overseas and at home and in response to heated campaign rhetoric? If so, in what direction?

On July 11, Brookings launched two new public opinion surveys focusing on American attitudes towards the Middle East, conducted by Nonresident Senior Fellow Shibley Telhami: One was conducted just two weeks before the Orlando shooting, the other taken two weeks after—thus providing an opportunity to evaluate any shift in public attitudes. In addition, some of the same questions were asked in Telhami’s polls the previous two years, thus providing a further opportunity to evaluate trends. One of the polls also includes a significant oversample of millennials (18-34) for further demographic analysis.

Telhami was joined in discussion by William Galston, the Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in Governance Studies at Brookings. Tamara Cofman Wittes, senior fellow and director of the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings, provided introductory remarks and moderated the discussion.

Join the conversation on Twitter using #AfterOrlando

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On June 13, Brookings launched a new public opinion survey focusing on American attitudes toward refugees from the Middle East and from Syria in particular.

With violence in the Middle East and the associated refugee crisis continuing unabated, these issues remain prominent in Washington policy debates. It is therefore increasingly important for U.S. policymakers, political candidates, and voters to understand the American public’s attitudes toward the conflicts in the Middle East and the refugees fleeing those crises.

On June 13, Brookings launched a new public opinion survey focusing on American attitudes toward refugees from the Middle East and from Syria in particular. Conducted by Nonresident Senior Fellow Shibley Telhami, the poll looks at a range of questions, from whether Americans feel the United States has a moral obligation to take in refugees to whether these refugees pose a threat to national security. The national poll takes into account an expanded set of demographic variables and includes an over-sized sample of millennials.  

Telhami was joined in discussion by POLITICO Magazine and Boston Globe contributor Indira Lakshmanan. William McCants, senior fellow and director of the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World at Brookings, provided introductory remarks and moderated the discussion.

This event launched the Brookings Refugees Forum, which will take place on June 14 and 15.

Join the conversation on Twitter using #RefugeeCrisis.

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So we’ve almost reached the end of the year 2015, which could go down in the history of global sustainable development efforts as one of the more significant years, with the trifecta of the approval of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the agreement on the Addis Agenda on Financing for Development (FfD) and the (shortly to be completed) Paris COP21 Climate Summit. Yet, all will depend on how the agreements with their ambitious targets are implemented on the ground.

Effective implementation will require a theory of change—a way to think about how we are to get from “here” in 2015 to “there” in 2030. The key problem is what has very appropriately been called by some “the missing middle,” i.e., the gap between the top-down global targets on the one hand and the bottom-up development initiatives, projects, and programs that are supported by governments, aid agencies, foundations, and social entrepreneurs.

One way to begin to close this gap is to aim for scaled-up global efforts in specific areas, as is pledged in the Addis Agenda, including efforts to fight global hunger and malnutrition, international tax cooperation and international cooperation to strengthen capacities of municipalities and other local authorities, investments and international coopera­tion to allow all children to complete free, equitable, inclusive and quality early childhood, primary and secondary education, and concessional and non-concessional financing.

Another way is to develop country-specific national targets and plans consistent with the SDG, Addis, and COP21 targets, as is currently being done with the assistance of the United Nations Development Program’s MAPS program. This can provide broad guidance on policy priorities and resource mobilization strategies to be pursued at the national level and can help national and international actors to prioritize their interventions in areas where a country’s needs are greatest.

However, calling for expanded global efforts in particular priority areas and defining national targets and plans is not enough. Individual development actors have to link their specific projects and programs with the national SDG, Addis, and COP21 targets. They systematically have to pursue a scaling-up strategy in their areas of engagement, i.e., to develop and pursue pathways from individual time-bound interventions to impact at a scale in a way that will help achieve the global and national targets. A recent paper I co-authored with Larry Cooley summarizes two complementary approaches of how one might design and implement such scaling-up pathways. The main point, however, is that only the pursuit of such scaling-up pathways constitutes a meaningful theory of change that offers hope for effective implementation of the new global sustainable development targets.

Fortunately, over the last decade, development analysts and agencies have increasingly focused on the question of how to scale up impact of successful development interventions. Leading the charge, the World Bank in 2004, under its president Jim Wolfensohn, organized a high-level international conference in Shanghai in cooperation with the Chinese authorities on the topic of scaling up development impact and published the associated analytical work. However, with changes in the leadership at the World Bank, the initiative passed to others in the mid-2000s, including the Brookings Institution, ExpandNet (a group of academics working with the World Health Organization), Management Systems International (MSI), and Stanford University. They developed analytical frameworks for systematically assessing scalability of development initiatives and innovations, analyzed the experience with more or less successful scaling-up initiatives, including in fragile and conflict-affected states, and established networks that bring together development experts and practitioners to share knowledge.

By now, many international development agencies (including GIZ, JICA, USAID, African Development Bank, IFAD and UNDP), foundations (including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation) and leading development NGOs (including Heifer International, Save the Children and the World Resources Institute), among others, have focused on how best to scale up development impact, while the OECD recently introduced a prize for the most successful scaling-up development initiatives. The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) is perhaps the most advanced among the agencies, having developed a systematic operational approach to the innovation-learning-scaling-up cycle. In a collaborative effort with the Brookings Institution, IFAD reviewed its operational practices and experience and then prepared operational design and evaluation guidelines, which can serve as a good example for other development agencies. The World Bank, while yet to develop a systematic institution-wide approach to the scaling-up agenda, is exploring in specific areas how best to pursue scaled-up impact, such as in the areas of mother and child health, social enterprise innovation, and the “science of delivery.”

Now that the international community has agreed on the SDGs and the Addis Agenda, and is closing in on an agreement in Paris on how to respond to climate change, it is the right time to bridge the “missing middle” by linking the sustainable development and climate targets with effective scaling-up methodologies and practices among the development actors. In practical terms, this requires the following steps:

• Developing shared definitions, analytical frameworks, and operational approaches to scaling up among development experts;
• Developing sectoral and sub-sectoral strategies at country level that link short- and medium-term programs and interventions through scaling-up pathways with the longer-term SDG and climate targets;
• Introducing effective operational policies and practices in the development agencies in country strategies, project design, and monitoring and evaluation;
• Developing multi-stakeholder partnerships around key development interventions with the shared goal of pursuing well-identified scaling-up pathways focused on the achievement of the SDGs and climate targets;
• Developing incentive schemes based on the growing experience with “challenge funds” that focus not only on innovation, but also on scaling up, such as the recently established Global Innovation Fund; and
• Further building up expert and institutional networks to share experience and approaches, such as the Community of Practice on Scaling Up, recently set up by MSI and the Results for Development Institute.