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Scale is a verb, not a noun: The trajectory and curve of impact are more important than the numbers.

Digital platforms for urban democracy are analyzed in Madrid and Barcelona. These platforms permit citizens to debate urban issues with other citizens; to propose developments, plans, and policies for city authorities; and to influence how city budgets are spent. Contrasting with neoliberal assumptions about Smart Citizenship, the technopolitics discourse underpinning these developments recognizes that the technologies facilitating participation have themselves to be developed...

This article reviews longstanding debates about the relationship between power over and power to – often posed as the tension between domination and emancipation. It then turns to several frameworks which integrate these approaches to inform strategies for social action. In particular, it focuses on recent empirical studies which apply one such framework, the ‘powercube’, to glean insights into how social actors navigate across multiple forms, spaces and levels of power. In so doing, we gain...

This article explores the potential of using participatory action research as an adaptive programming modality to drive learning and innovation to tackle the drivers of (and seek to eliminate) the Worst Forms of Child Labour. We draw on our experience from early phases of implementation of a large-scale action research programme, which despite the constraints covid-19 posed in moving to full implementation and participatory engagement with children and other stakeholders on the ground, is...

Meeting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will require adapting or redirecting a variety of very complex global and local human systems. It is essential that development scholars and practitioners have tools to understand the dynamics of these systems and the key drivers of their behavior, such as barriers to progress and leverage points for driving sustainable change. System dynamics tools are well suited to address this challenge, but they must first be adapted for...

Evaluation processes that facilitate learning among advocates must be nimble, creative, and meaningful while transcending putative performance and accountability management. This article describes the experience, lessons, and trajectory of one such approach, Simple, Participatory Assessment of Real Change (SPARC), that a transnational HIV prevention research advocacy coalition pilot-tested in sub-Saharan Africa. Inspired by the pioneering work of the outcome harvesting (OH) and participatory...

Systems change is more a destination than a journey. “Scalable solutions” might be a better way to make the trip.

Development strategies, programmes and projects are designed making assumptions concerning several variables such as future prices of outputs and inputs, exchange rates and productivity growth. However, knowledge about the future is limited. Uncertainty prevails. The usual approach to deal with uncertainty is to reduce it to risk. Uncertainty is perceived as a negative factor that should and can be eliminated. This article presents an alternative approach which recognises that radical...

This paper tackles a key problem in path dependence research: how can locked-in organizations regain their scope for maneuver? Leveraging insights from two surprising and thus revelatory cases of organizations that have successfully escaped from path dependence, we develop the theoretical argument that regaining scope for maneuver can be achieved by interrupting the logic of a path’s underlying self-reinforcing mechanisms. More specifically, we argue that, through a targeted interruption of...

This paper examines the tension within international development programmes between traditional task-oriented approaches to development and the wider view of programmes as sites for adaptability and learning. It characterises it as a set of inter-related tensions between recursive and adaptive tendencies that exist at individual actor, programme and institutional levels. Drawing on a multiple interpretive case study of partnership based programmes between an international non-government...

Amplifying the impact of sustainability initiatives to foster transformations in urban and rural contexts, has received increasing attention in resilience, social innovation, and sustainability transitions research. We review the literature on amplification frameworks and propose an integrative typology of eight processes, which aim to increase the impact of such initiatives. The eight amplification processes are: stabilizing, speeding up, growing, replicating, transferring, spreading,...

This paper analyzes the award-winning e-participation initiative of the city council of Madrid, Decide Madrid, to identify the critical success factors and the main barriers that are conditioning its performance. An exploratory case study is used as a research technique, including desk research and semi-structured interviews. The analysis distinguishes contextual, organizational and individual level factors; it considers whether the factors or barriers are more related to the information and...

Your awesome model doesn’t get to serious scale unless others replicate it, too. Here’s how to make it happen.

Daunting social problems need scalable solutions. Here’s how to know if you’ve got one.

This paper examines how employees become simultaneously empowered and alienated by detailed, holistic knowledge of the actual operations of their organization, drawing on an inductive analysis of the experiences of employees working on organizational change teams. As employees build and scrutinize process maps of their organization, they develop a new comprehension of the structure and operation of their organization. What they had perceived as purposively designed, relatively stable, and...

Rather than a glossy brochure that no one reads, your strategy should be an ongoing practice that informs your decisions and adapts as circumstances change. A Viewpoint from the Summer 2019 issue.

Polycentricity is a fundamental concept in commons scholarship that connotes a complex form of governance with multiple centers of semiautonomous decision making. If the decision-making centers take each other into account in competitive and cooperative relationships and have recourse to conflict resolution mechanisms, they may be regarded as a polycentric governance system. In the context of natural resource governance, commons scholars have ascribed a number of advantages to polycentric...

Healthcare systems are increasingly recognised as complex, in which a range of non-linear and emergent behaviours occur. China’s healthcare system is no exception. The hugeness of China, and the variation in conditions in different jurisdictions present very substantial challenges to reformers, and militate against adopting one-size-fits-all policy solutions. As a consequence, approaches to change management in China have frequently emphasised the importance of sub-national experimentation,...

More and more global aid agencies believe they should replace one-size-fits-all best practices with locally tailored solutions, but they must shift from just agreeing to “go local” to preparing development experts for the task by taking on three major problems with their internal practices.