What is Needed to Scale Reform?
R ecently there’s been a fair amount of debate in two projects that I’ve had the good fortune to work with. The debate is about what exactly is needed to scale up reforms. Say you have tested a development reform theory in a pilot site, and the results are great. Now you (and your donor) want to implement the reform beyond the pilot site - ideally, nationwide! What will it take to do that? Some colleagues say the only thing needed to scale up a successful reform is a national policy. Others think policies are necessary to establish the legal basis for the reform nationwide, but is not enough to actually make nationwide implementation happen. That, they say, will require additional inputs from development workers. While I was cleaning out old files from my magic trunk I came across materials from reform projects I had worked on over the last two decades or so. As I read through them I found that our work always involved any combination of the following: 1) introduction of ...