Making a research portfolio legible to two governments.

The situation

KONEKSI supports collaborative research partnerships between Australian and Indonesian institutions across a broad thematic portfolio, spanning environment and climate change, digital transformation and clean energy transition. Dozens of projects, multiple disciplines, two national policy contexts.

The problem

A portfolio at that scale produces a familiar failure. Every individual project is documented thoroughly, and the portfolio as a whole is invisible. An officer who needed to understand what the program was achieving in a given thematic area had no way to find out short of reading everything.

There was a second problem underneath it. The two primary audiences did not share a frame of reference. Australian readers understood the work through DFAT program logic. Indonesian readers understood it through their own national development priorities. A document written for one would fail quietly with the other.

The approach

Portfolio level synthesis anchored to Indonesian national development priorities, so Indonesian government readers could locate the work inside their own framework rather than an imported one. Named impact pathways running through the narrative, so individual projects read as parts of a pattern rather than a list.

Consistent project formats across the portfolio, with geography and thematic tagging, so comparison within a theme became possible and officers could extract the three or four projects relevant to their brief without reading the other thirty.

Language throughout treated Indonesian institutions as co-producers of knowledge rather than recipients of it. That is both accurate and materially different in how it lands with an Indonesian audience.

The outcome

The portfolio became something officers could use rather than something they had to read. Consistent formats and thematic tagging meant a DFAT officer preparing a brief could extract the relevant projects directly, and Indonesian counterparts could locate the work inside their own policy framework rather than translating it out of someone else's.

Two decisions carried most of that. The writing held to plain language throughout, avoiding the abbreviations and sector shorthand that development reporting normally depends on and that quietly excludes anyone outside the program. And gender equality, disability and social inclusion ran through the project narratives rather than sitting in a section of their own, which turned that material from a reporting requirement into part of the case for bilateral impact.

The approach is not specific to development. Any organisation reporting to a funder it does not control, in a language it did not choose, has some version of the same problem.