# Vignette 23: Bosnia & Herzegovina's green transition portfolio
When Bosnia & Herzegovina's Accelerator Lab began exploring circular economy in 2021, they started small. "We selected five very different companies from five very different sectors," explains Amina Omićević, Head of Solutions Mapping. Working with businesses ranging from rural farms to textile factories, they co-developed practical solutions for a circular economy, including composting organic waste, optimizing fuel consumption, and reducing water usage. The team made modest investments in equipment and tracked tangible results, such as water bills, waste costs, and fuel consumption.
These early experiments revealed unexpected patterns. Beyond technical solutions, the Lab discovered that real change came from individuals: their behaviours, mindsets, and daily practices. "Everything that we did, including experimentation around waste, fed into the portfolio logic later on," Amina reflects. Each small experiment added another piece to understanding how systems change.[\[1\]](#endnote-1)
This accumulated evidence became crucial when the UNDP Bosnia & Herzegovina decided to develop the country's first portfolio approach in 2024, recognising that the complexity and interconnected nature of the green transition required a more adaptive, system-wide approach. The experiments had shown that behaviour change was possible and that practical, locally-adapted solutions could take root. This knowledge shaped how they designed the portfolio with a particular emphasis on behavioural and societal aspects, an approach that put individual behaviours and mindsets at the heart of system change rather than focusing primarily on technical solutions.
To develop this portfolio collaboratively, the Lab established the Green Transition Engagement Platform, a semi-formal advisory mechanism bringing together over 100 stakeholders from 14 government levels, mining communities, youth representatives, and other sectors, as well as involving other UN agencies and UNDP experts. Through quarterly learning events organized around four pillars (decarbonization, depollution, biodiversity, and circular economy), they created a learning community that crossed traditional government silos and sectors. As the platform evolved, the Lab noticed momentum building across the ecosystem; even skeptical stakeholders began showing up consistently, recognizing that green transition challenges demanded collaboration.
To enable continuous learning across this community, they set up a collaborative workspace in Microsoft Loop where stakeholders document insights and refine learning questions in real-time. This living repository – which they call their "Wikipedia of insights" – captures weekly reflections from key stakeholders, allowing the entire team to learn from each other's experiences as they go.
This collaborative approach transformed how government officials understood the challenges of the green transition. It highlighted how issues related to energy, waste, biodiversity, and the circular economy cut across various ministerial boundaries, with even the energy ministry acknowledging the necessity of multi-sectoral collaboration. At UNDP, the country office redesigned its structure to establish an Innovation and Integration Cell. This initiative aimed to manage the portfolio effectively and convert fragmented project knowledge into collective intelligence.[\[2\]](#endnote-2)
For the government, UNDP, and the broader ecosystem, the portfolio approach fostered a capability for continuous renewal, allowing adaptation and evolution in response to new challenges and opportunities as they arose.
{% hint style="info" %}
#### **Key takeaways:**
* **Start with tangible experiments:** Run small prototypes and pilots with clear metrics (costs saved, resources reduced) to build evidence of what drives change in your specific context
* **Accumulated learnings from small experiments:** Use the results and insights from early experiments – both successes and challenges – to shape the architecture of system-wide initiatives
* **Create platforms for collective learning:** Bring together unusual combinations of stakeholders regularly around thematic areas to break silos and build shared understanding
* **Build learning infrastructure early:** Embed learning questions into every intervention and create digital systems to capture insights across teams in real-time
* **Design for continuous adaptation and renewal:** Use portfolio approaches that allow resources and interventions to shift based on system changes and emerging learning
{% endhint %}
***
## Notes
1. See Amina Omićević's reflections on this multi-year journey from small waste experiments to system understanding in her blog "The waste puzzle" (Omićević, 2024). [↑](#endnote-ref-1)
2. For insights into how this organizational restructuring supported the transition from projects to portfolios, see the reflections on the Innovation and Integration Cell's journey (Dimova, 2023). [↑](#endnote-ref-2)
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