Recent research shows that commissioning for sustainable and people-led change needs investment in skills, developing them and challenging them.
Investing in the skills and resources required
The skills and resources that underpin good commissioning are:
- sufficient commissioning and procurement awareness, knowledge and experience
- strong leadership skills combined with strong technical expertise to harness the appetite for change
- strong relationships within and between the public, third and independent sectors
- robust data systems that enable high-quality decisions
- sufficient investment in time and energy is required in relationship development and codesign
Developing locally driven solutions
The research concluded that there is no one single template for commissioning well – the essential element is that responses should be specifically tailored to the local need and conditions:
- start with local context and learn from national examples
- understand local context and design to meet local needs
- use practice and examples from other places
- apply national frameworks to understand which tools they could use in their local solution
- building the markets you want to see – commissioning organisations can support the growth of services in the market. This approach builds capacity in the third and independent sectors by helping individuals and organisations make changes
Challenging the fundamentals
The evidence shows that making change requires us to actively challenge how the system currently works. This includes:
- questioning competition-driven approaches
- creating safe spaces to discuss power imbalances between organisations
- rethinking how we budget our resources
- addressing false beliefs about what we can achieve with available tools
- tackling risk aversion in organisations that puts up unhelpful boundaries
Find out more about ethical commissioning and the research around it.