Knowledge is distributed — so knowledge systems must be too

The consulting-driven model at the centre of public and multilateral procurement and international development is no longer fit for purpose.

Global institutions face complex, emergent and often highly localised challenges. The knowledge needed to meet these challenges exists — but it is fragmented, contested and routinely bypassed.

The result is a growing disconnect between those designing policy and those best positioned to inform it.

Governments and institutions in the Global South are too often pushed towards the most generalised experts, the most geographically ‘neutral’ advisors, and the most standardised and least implementable solutions.

This default model drains internal capacity and displaces local problem-solving.

The more governments and businesses outsource, the less they know how to do, causing organisations to become hollowed out, stuck in time and unable to evolve.

Mariana Mazzucato, University College, London, The Big Con (2023)

We take the opposite approach.

We work to restore contextualised public decision-making capacity by connecting institutions with specialists who are:

Specialised — technical experts with global credibility
Situated — proximate to the political, geographic or institutional context
Actionable — focused on implementation, not abstraction

We do this by building distributed knowledge infrastructure: lightweight, decentralised and sovereign by design. Our model supports collaboration across countries, organisations and missions — without defaulting to extractive intermediaries or conditional partnerships.

At the centre of our approach is the ability for institutions to commission, retain, publish and share knowledge on their own terms.

That means designing systems where the public interest — not commercial scale or foreign validation — determines what gets funded, shared and implemented.

We are a growing network of in-country experts, independent organisations and collaborative partners working to strengthen institutional capacity where it’s needed most.

Polylateralism is about including those actors who otherwise have little weight in the formal multilateral framework of nation states. NGOs, businesses, cities, large academic institutions… Those heterogeneous actors carry an energy and a dynamic which we struggle to exploit appropriately.

Pascal Lamy, President, Paris Peace Forum

	Polylateral	Incumbents
Transparency	✅ Wholly owned by a registered nonprofit with transparent governance	❌ Global webs of subsidiaries with opaque ownership structures and contracting chains
Governance	✅ All profits distributed or recirculated within the association	❌ Shareholder and stakeholder clashes and asymmetries
Neutrality	✅ Founded and headquartered in Switzerland	❌ Incorporated in jurisdictions known for their political nonneutrality
Independence	✅ Decentralised network of small nonaligned firms resistant to groupthink or capture	❌ Corporate or partisan groupthink and intelligence homogeneity
Capacity building	✅ Focused on embedding knowledge to build or rebuild institutional capacity	❌ Systemic outsourcing that erodes institutional capability
Intercultural context	✅ Native speakers with global experience situated in-country or regionally	❌ Fly-in, fly-out multinational consultants with little contextual depth
Diversity of knowledge	✅ Global South expertise overlooked by traditional EU/US institutions	❌ Expensive monoculture of mid-career professionals
Openness	✅ Decentralised, on-demand expert pool across generations and organisations	❌ Centralised, hierarchical expert routing with poor contextual fit
Digital delivery	✅ On-demand briefings, calls and consortia for crisis support	❌ Inexperienced junior consultants delivering slow, outdated reports
Customisation	✅ Problem-driven interventions designed for specific institutional needs	❌ Standardised templates recycled from unrelated settings
Privacy	✅ Swiss or EU-based infrastructure with privacy-enhancing defaults and GDPR/CCPA compliance	❌ Metadata surveillance and compromised informational exchange