Knowledge is distributed — so knowledge-holding organisations must be distributed
The concentrated multinational consulting model at the heart of public-sector procurement, multilateralism, aid and development is broken and no longer serves the public.
Organisations in the international system persist with critical knowledge gaps because problems are often new, highly technical and invariably localised, and the knowledge required to address them is both emergent and aggressively competed over.
The model that persists – especially in the Global South, where the stakes are highest – is one where decision-makers are incentivised to call on experts that are most generalised (like MBAs, accountants and lawyers, or ultimately anyone really) and the most objective (geographically or professionally proximate but, in reality, quite far from the problem itself) with the most standardised (non-implementable, or quasi-implementable) interventions.
This inefficient and inadequate outsourcing leads to exponentially diminishing capacity inside these institutions.
Polylat instead provides knowledge localisation: we connect public institutions and leaders directly with external subject specialists that are the most
- specialised – global subject experts in technical niches, and
- subjective – proximate and intimately familiar with the specific context, with the
- customised interventions for implementation in that context.
Polylat is a distributed galaxy of small firms in the Global South inputting independent, localised, on-demand, no-strings-attached intelligence to assist local decision-makers in building or rebuilding the capacity of their institutions – without outside, asymmetrical intermediation.
In this way, we create intergenerational, crosscultural ecosystems of senior and junior in-country experts, and more specialised, smaller/medium-sized local expert organisations, ultimately delivering public value with better informed decisions.
"Polylateralism is about including those actors who otherwise have little weight in the formal multilateral framework of nation states," Pascal Lamy, President of the Paris Peace Forum, has said.
"NGOs, businesses, cities, large academic institutions... Those heterogeneous actors carry an energy and a dynamic which we struggle to exploit appropriately."
| Polylat | Incumbents | |
|---|---|---|
| Transparency | ✅ Wholly owned by a registered nonprofit with transparent governance |
❌ Global webs of subsidiaries with opaque ownership structures and contracting processes |
| 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 galaxy of small, nonaligned firms incapable of groupthink or capture |
❌ Corporate or partisan groupthink and intelligence homogeneity |
| Capacity building | ✅ Focused on plugging knowledge in to build or rebuild institutional capacity |
❌ Outsourcing away public capacity and incapacitating institutions |
| Intercultural context | ✅ Native speakers with global experience situated in-country or regionally |
❌ Fly-in, fly-out multinational management consultants |
| Diversity of knowledge | ✅ Global South talent pool overlooked outside traditional EU/US centres |
❌ Expensive monoculture of mid-career professionals |
| Openness | ✅ Decentralised, on-demand expert pool of young and old experts and organisations |
❌ Centralised, hierarchical approach ensuring the least appropriate expert for the job |
| Digital delivery | ✅ On-demand briefings, calls and consortia for crisis situations |
❌ Inexperienced junior consultants slow to respond with lengthy, outdated reports |
| Customisation | ✅ Motivated to solve problems of public institutions, not sell them solutions |
❌ Standardised blueprints adapted from questionable solutions in other countries |
| Privacy | ✅ Swiss or EU-based privacy-enhancing digital and data infrastructure ensuring GDPR/CCPA-compliance |
❌ Metadata surveillance and compromised exchange |