Mr. Burgeon, you are ending your five-year tenure as Co-Chair of the CADRI Board of Directors. What are your reflections on the evolution of the Partnership since you took over from UNICEF in 2015?
Dominique Burgeon: What a journey it has been! I witnessed the transformation of the CADRI Initiative from its humble beginning as a disaster management training programme to a comprehensive capacity development partnership in disaster risk reduction (DRR) and climate change adaptation (CCA).
CADRI started as a small initiative of like-minded directors of emergency in the lead. During my co-chairmanship, I saw the CADRI Partnership expand from 12 to 20 partners. In addition to the UN System and IFRC, the Global Network of Civil Society Organizations for Disaster Reduction (GNDR), OECD and RedR Australia have joined “the club”. This is a diverse community of actors with different agendas who are brought together by one common ambition: building on each other's comparative advantage and expertise to provide an integrated and comprehensive offer of services to countries.
We have come a long way. We now have a joint-programme with a pooled fund mechanism.Our partnership with the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg has enabled us to scale up our country engagement and develop digital solutions for capacity development. We have decentralized the delivery of CADRI services to the regions. Most importantly, we are building a community of capacity development practitioners across the UN System and beyond. Huge progress has been made, but it needs to be maintained.
What do you consider your main accomplishments as CADRI Board Co-Chair over the past five years?
Dominique Burgeon: First of all, there are not many partnerships of this nature (inter-agency and multi-sectoral) that could sustain over a decade or more. When I look back, I am proud to be part of the CADRI family, which is a genuine inter-agency effort to "walk-the-talk" of the UN reform. Designing and getting such an ambitious inter-agency initiative as is the Joint-Programme signed was a big achievement.
Our ambition was to further transform CADRI. To expand its scope to cover climate change adaptation; to systematically integrate conflict sensitivity in our disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation efforts and to operationalize our Leaving No-One Behind principles. Together with UNDP as co-chair, we had set an ambitious goal, and despite the difficulties inherent to any partnership, we managed to keep partners engaged and ensure success. One particular accomplishment has been bringing humanitarian and development partners together around a common agenda on prevention.
Of course, our main satisfaction comes from the positive feedback from the countries we serve on the quality and relevance of the services we deliver. Testimonials from UN Resident Coordinators on how CADRI has helped raise the profile of disaster risk and climate change on the national development agenda and increase the uptake of investment in disaster risk reduction by local stakeholders, and testimonials from governments on how CADRI has helped improve their systems and change their approach to reducing disaster and climate risk, all are incentives to continue our joint work.
Could you highlight some of the success to advance disaster risk reduction during your co-chairmanship?
Dominique Burgeon: I have worked in emergency response over the past twenty years. I have seen countries devastated by disasters. I have seen communities displaced, their crops, livestock and villages wiped away within minutes. Emergencies like the COVID-19 pandemic have emphasized once more the need for a multi-sector and multi-hazard approach. Strengthening countries’ capacities to prevent and withstand such crises is about strengthening risk information systems, improving contingency planning in nutrition, health, agriculture and WASH, or increasing access to safety nets for vulnerable farmers. It takes a whole of government and whole of society approach.
National strategies are essential for setting milestones, establishing responsibilities of different sector ministries and non-government actors, and allocating resources. CADRI helps countries to identify their priorities and develop their national plans. In Serbia,following devastating floods, CADRI supported the government re-assess its priorities, articulate its national DRR strategy and opened the way for FAO to raise the profile of DRR in the agricultural strategy and enhance its disaster damage and loss assessment methodology. In Jordan, the new national DRR strategy promotes a better integration of DRR in Water, Environment and Agriculture strategies. In Namibia, CADRI services contributed to accelerate institutional and policy reform and raise DRR agenda as a national priority. In Iran most recently, CADRI helped develop a UN DRR framework that serves as a platform for engagement with various sector ministries.
What are your reflections as the outgoing CADRI Board Co-Chair?
Dominique Burgeon: CADRI is a global partnership composed of twenty entities, with a high turnover amongst the Directors on the CADRI Board. It is critical to nurture a sense of community and belonging amongst CADRI partner agencies. This is needed to ensure continuous ownership and leadership of CADRI partners at all levels, from technical to management and from country to regional/sub-regional to global. It is also important to promote mutual accountability for results. The impact of CADRI services can only be as good as CADRI partner agencies (each one of us) want it to be. The quality of CADRI products depends on our willingness and ability to deploy the right expertise in response to government requests.
Secondly, it is the role of the Board Co-Chairs to encourage our community of Board members to socialize CADRI services and communicate CADRI results internally horizontally, and vertically within each agency. This will further promote complementarities and maximize synergies between CADRI works and agency specific programming.
Finally, our CADRI Business Model is lean and cost effective. We established a Pooled Fund to ensure predictable financing for a light facilitation function at a global and regional level. The Board Co-Chairs must lead the way to sustain our business model with appropriate resource mobilization efforts by CADRI Partners.
As you will remain a CADRI Board member, what and how would you like to see CADRI further evolve?
Dominique Burgeon: A lot remains to be done for CADRI to become the even more agile and innovative capacity development facility that we strive for. We must continuously invest in adapting our services to evolving country demands. We must adapt our services to improve systems and skills to implement preventive and anticipatory approaches and proactive crisis management in fragile contexts, for instance engaging more with non-state actors. The CADRI methodological approach can also help operationalize the Humanitarian-Development-Peace nexus on the ground, even more so now that the CADRI tool integrates elements of conflict sensitivity.
Looking forward, we must harness the potential of digital transformation for capacity development. Digital technology is a means to foster inclusive, participative consultations on DRR priorities and needed investment in different sectors. It is my expectation that the CADRI Digital Tool will make us more agile to reach many more country stakeholders including private sector and civil society actors.
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Dominique Burgeon has held various leadership positions with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). He served as Director of FAO’s Emergency and Resilience Division from 2012 to 2020, after being FAO Representative in Bangladesh, where he oversaw one of FAO’s largest country programmes, putting into practice the concepts of disaster risk management for food and nutrition security. Dominique has also served in Syria and at UN Headquarters in New York. In January 2021, he was appointed as Director, FAO Liaison Office with the United Nations in Geneva and continues to act as Director ad interim, Office of Emergencies and Resilience.