Your Friendly Neighbourhood Change Agent

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A lot occupant fills up an application for a free patent title (Sta Fe, Agusan del Sur)

“How do you plan to scale your reform?”

It’s the buzz-question of the day, the latest trend in the development world.  How can the scope and benefits of your reform go beyond its initial area of implementation, preferably without investing additional funds or effort?

It’s the antidote to pilotitis, the expensive practice of implementing a sophisticated reform in the one place it can happen, then leaving it there to hopefully inspire others to copy.  

 Scaling up is about getting the widest bang for the development buck.  If the reform can be scaled, more would benefit.  But it has to scale without additional effort from you or additional investment from your funder.

A good number of reforms have been scaled up, and subsequently attracted attention.  Scaling up has been talked about in national and international development conferences.   So much so that now, when you propose a reform idea, your boss will probably ask, "But is it scalable?"  And if a reform can’t be scaled, it might not be pursued.

But there are still a million development challenges that affect only a particular region, province, city, municipality, barangay, or neighbourhood.  By the localised nature of these challenges, their solutions are not necessarily scalable.  So should reformers drop these reform ideas, simply because they can't be implemented elsewhere?

Problem is, the bigger development organisations work at the national or international scale.  They are looking for national solutions to national problems.  So your local problem, with its limited area of concern, is too small for them to be concerned about.  Your local problem, which does not affect the rest of the country, is not deemed "strategic".  They’re not going to dissipate their resources on small reforms like yours.

Which is why there is still a need for your friendly neighbourhood change agent - somebody who knows your community well enough to care for its unique problems (the way Peter Benjamin Parker knows and cares about Queens, NY).  

 Somebody who is willing to look for other local actors to find and apply solutions.  

 Someone who does not mind working with non-scalable solutions - as long as they address the real needs of people they know and live with. Someone who understands that not all reform have to be scalable, just applicable.

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