SCALING UP IN AGRICULTURE, RURAL DEVELOPMENT, AND NUTRITION
Lessons on Scaling Up: Opportunities and Challenges for the Future JOHANNES F. LINN
Focus 19 • brIeF 20 • June 2012 A
griculture and rural development are essential components of economic growth and the battle against poverty, hunger,
and malnutrition worldwide. In the developing world, investment in agriculture was much neglected in recent decades by governments and donors alike, as outlined in Brief 2. Following global spikes in food prices over the past several years, world attention has once again focused on the critical need to support this key sector. But it is not just a question of more investment and more aid; it is a question of how governments and donors ensure value for money. In the past, attention has focused on innovations in agricultural technology and rural development interventions, with little thought given to how one takes successful interventions to scale. Common political and administrative incentives have reinforced this pattern, as has an increasingly fragmented international aid architecture, in which small and disconnected donor-funded projects predominate. It is now becoming clear that both innovation and scaling up
“what works” are critical, and the policy briefs in this series provide many outstanding examples for effectively scaling up successful interventions in developing countries. They show not only that scaling up is possible but that there is an increasing commitment to it among concerned actors. It is not enough to merely replicate interventions; what matters is to scale up impact sustainably. Scaling up is not an end in itself but an instrument to achieve the goal of improved lives for the greatest number of people. The previous briefs further demonstrate that it helps to have
a common analytical framework and a common language as stakeholders consider scaling-up opportunities and challenges. The analytical framework used in this set considers pathways, drivers, and spaces (Brief 1). This is only one possible framework, but the authors found it helpful in exploring the experience of scaling up and considering suitable approaches for the future. This brief summarizes the main conclusions from this wide-
ranging series. It looks at the actors, dimensions, processes, and pathways of scaling up while summarizing what we have learned about the drivers of the process and how to create the spaces that allow scaling up to take place. Finally, it comments on cross-cutting issues that are relevant to the scaling-up process and that must be addressed as interventions are brought to scale.
Actors
Virtually all effective scaling-up experiences in agriculture, rural development, and nutrition have involved a multiplicity of actors: national, state, and local governments; civil society organizations; private businesses; public and private external donors; and, most importantly, farmers and rural communities. In the case of community-driven programs, Hans P. Binswanger-Mkhize and Jacomina de Regt said in Brief 3 that “bottom up meets top down.” And, perhaps most obviously in the development of value chains, many actors must engage throughout the change process. For effective scaling up, the development of multistakeholder alliances is a key ingredient.
Dimensions
Effective scaling up of agricultural and rural development interventions usually takes place across multiple dimensions. The development program in the Peruvian Highlands (Brief 4) provides a case in point: projects gradually spread across different areas through “horizontal” scaling up, expanding thematically to cover broader aspects of the rural economy with “functional” scaling up. Over time, they scaled up “vertically” with adoption by the national government. One lesson drawn from the case studies in this series is that horizontal and vertical scaling up usually have to be combined to achieve success. This is true for area development programs in Peru and China, new rice production methods in Vietnam, value chain development, and community development programs.
Scaling-up process and pathways There is no unique scaling-up process. It may be carefully planned from the beginning, as in the case of the value-chain development supported by PepsiCo, or it can be opportunistic, as in the Peru case. It may follow a broadly predictable sequence to disseminating technical innovation, as in the case of Vietnamese rice production improvements, or it may go against the better judgment of professional peers and be seen to involve considerable risk, like the China Loess Watershed Rehabilitation Project. It may involve a linear three-step sequence: (1) piloting an innovation, (2) piloting the scaling-up process, and (3) rolling out at-scale, as envisaged for community development programs in Brief 3. It can follow a more iterative pattern combining scaling up with innovation, as in the Peruvian Highlands projects and programs of the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN). Or it may involve the mainstreaming of innovations in the context of existing development programs, as documented for the case of some of the initiatives supported under the Alive & Thrive program in Bangladesh. In no case, however, was the process purely technocratic. It
always involved a long-term engagement—more than 10 to 15 years in many cases—and adherence to a combination of key principles: a vision that scale was ultimately critical, a readiness to plan for scaling up in sensible steps, effective management of the process, learning by doing and adapting the approach as needed, building on opportunities for action as they arose, working with partners, and ensuring motivation among the stakeholders in the process. While some of the successes were serendipitous, there is little doubt that a systematic and deliberate approach in defining the scaling- up pathway is more likely to result in the effort being pursued and achieved successfully. AKDN, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Oxfam, PepsiCo, and the Global Fund have worked this way for some time, and now the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) initiative are also pursuing a systematic approach. It helps to consider explicitly who or what are the drivers of the scaling-up process and how obstacles can be removed or spaces created so the initiatives can grow.
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