1. UNDP Philippines' Circular Economy (CE) portfolio has grown immensely over the last four years, with the same being a highlight of the upcoming Country Programme Document (CPD 2024-2028). But even with this growth (including warranting its own project team), the portfolio has depended on the involvement of the Accelerator Lab (ALab PH): whether to get things done (filling in gaps) or providing the necessary innovation flavor (spicing things up), or ideally in strategically supporting the portfolio to deliver impact. This involvement and engagement with the Climate Action Programme team (core team and project teams) had not always been smooth, with the joint portfolio team going through periods of conflict and misunderstanding that were interspersed with periods of breakthrough in collaboration. In 2023, the ALab PH’s CE team had to be reconstituted due to the demise of Rex Lor (lab lead for CE) and the departure of two Social Innovation Analysts assigned to CE (Alyanna Carrion & Juan Daray). It took some time for the team to replenish these roles (Kapi Capistrano, Head of Experimentation, tried to fill in for Rex but he is also occupied by other portfolios and roles in the CO; the new Head of Solutions Mapping is only about to join ALab in January 2024; and new Social Innovation Analysts for CE (Elmer Cuevas & Dee Urtua) joined ALab only in Q4 2023. 2. Where ALab PH sees itself strategically is not just in delivering strategic impact but also in demonstrating and measuring the same. After four years of tremendous growth of the portfolio, it has yet to show transformational change at the city level, although there are indications of it. E.g., key partner cities have invested their own resources to key initiatives and pursued new policies that promote circular investments. But these increased pro-circularity initiatives have not yet been shown to change how cities or their subsets produce or consume: a result that may be elusive even within the CPD period.  3. Given that the city was defined as the focus of action, the CE portfolio has put great emphasis on engaging local governments to jumpstart city-level portfolio development. Buy-in is needed to be built for a multi-stakeholder process, and UNDP had the benefit of starting the endeavor by partnering with a progressive-thinking local government (Pasig City), Under the Japan-funded Accelerating Circular Economy (ACE) project, the portfolio tried to accelerate the buy-in process through the “quick win” of providing these cities with waste processing and upcycling equipment. This tactic that may or may have not worked depending on context: some partner-cities thought of the same as co-investment, while others treated the same as a dole. 4. What the CE portfolio has regrettably not been able to put greater attention to is in nurturing the private sector. Though the ACE Project implemented components for the private sector—to develop the local circular value chains within cities, capacitate circular entrepreneurs, and conceptualize the Innovation for Circular Economy (ICE) Hub—their potential (especially of large corporations) to co-invest and co-commit to circularity has not yet been fully tapped. An opportunity to do this is in the implementation of the newly enacted Expanded Producer Responsibility (EPR) law, whose implementation UNDP is supporting through the development of implementing rules as well as an EPR portal. 5. Can the Alab PH generate revenue from supporting CO portfolios such as CE? Before anything else, we must again clarify that the ~$25 million mobilized by UNDP from EU (out of a total ~$60 million EU made available for the Green Economy Programme for the Philippines (GEPP)) is not for Alab PH alone nor is it solely due to its work. Alab PH is playing a supporting role, with the Climate Action Programme team rightfully taking the lead. They are accountable for pipeline development and programme design and delivery, while Alab PH who is responsible for providing social innovation support. Nevertheless, Alab PH explored the possibility of pursuing cost recovery for the services it had provided (to, among other things, plough back the revenue to other exploratory and experimental work). Though the projects under the CE portfolio have bankrolled some important costs for Alab PH most particularly the salaries of two Social Innovation Analysts posted to the CE portfolio, the cost of time and effort spent by the Alab Heads cannot yet unfortunately be recovered due to technicalities.

In many ways the handover has already been done and is continuously being undertaken through close collaboration with the portfolio team. Specifically, a crucial transition that Alab PH needed to help manage is the end of the ACE Project in March 2024 and the start of the EU-GEPP in the second quarter of the same year. The transition should ensure that the outputs, successes, and lessons learned are properly handed over between projects, with the latter building on and scaling on such. For one, three of the ACE Project cities are also part of the first 10 cities under EU-GEPP, and these three cities have clear plans and expectations for scale: Pasig City, for instance, clearly intends the ICE Hub concept and model to finally break ground. For the new cities—many of whom have contexts which vastly differ from the highly urbanized cities under the ACE Project—UNDP will need to test new ways to implement the same Systemic Design protocol: from ethnography to system engagement to portfolio co-creation. Clearly, UNDP will not have the bandwidth to handhold each city as it had done previously with Pasig city, and it will need to depend on force multipliers in the form of the innovation community.

The data that the ALab PH team collected at this stage is more inward-looking and retrospective as it sought to define how it could continue to best serve an innovation portfolio that has scaled into a full-fledged programme. With the team’s recent manpower constraints, such exercise has just recently begun, starting with a reflection of how the team (through its past and present members) has engaged the portfolio. This work is not beginning from scratch as the UNDP BRH has initiated some work on the development of the portfolio team: something that the latter has not been able to pay attention to since late 2022 due to competing priorities. In early 2024, the ALab PH team has planned a series of stocktaking exercises with key stakeholders notably the partner-cities. Hopefully, this exercise provides a better sense of the human investments required (including avoidance of unnecessary costs) for deep portfolio work and programme integration.

Systemic Design is the core process and method used by ALab PH not only in the CE portfolio but also in its other new portfolios (e.g., inclusive value chains). It is a mishmash of various tools, with the minimum being systems thinking and human-centered design, but recently has included other tools like foresight, design sprints, and sensemaking. As the ALab PH is in an inward-looking phase with respect to the CE portfolio, it has resorted to using sensemaking to understand the current suite of interventions and actions that the UNDP portfolio team has been performing while defining the desired results of such actions and the capacities needed to deliver such.