Most capital needs a measurable return, on a fundable timeline, from an accountable counterparty. What if the work that determines whether a transition succeeds delivers its value on none of those terms?
Capital flows easily to discrete projects and portfolios. It struggles to fund complex, long-horizon, interconnected systems change — and especially the connective tissue of an ecosystem, the trust and credibility built conversation by conversation. Initiatives at that scale ask for coalitions capable of stewarding coherent action across philanthropy, government, private sector, academia, and civil society.
The question this laboratory takes on: what if multi-sector collaborations could be incubated the way startups are incubated, accelerated, and deployed — but for complex sustainability transitions, and designed to work at different scales?
Participants join an applied conversation on the tensions, architecture, and capabilities needed to design, coordinate, and — crucially — finance collaborations of this kind, and on how their enabling infrastructure can be supported, repeated, and financed on purpose. The session feeds directly into a living R&D agenda through C3 Labs.
C3 — Collaboration for Complex Challenges — is an initiative focused on nexus issues, beginning with climate, biodiversity, and food, and launching this week in Bangkok and Nairobi. Its founding coalition was incubated among UNDP, UNEP, and Wageningen University, seed-funded by the Global Environment Facility Innovation Fund. Alongside the Symbiocene Initiative (applied research on systems finance, incubated at Georgetown's Tech & Society Initiative and MIT's Sustainability Initiative), SecondMuse (field experience from landscape transitions in Indonesia), and others, participants work as researchers in an active laboratory.
