Are your actions developing or distorting the system?
Key Principles and Steps
Market systems development programmes should leave behind more efficient and inclusive systems that function and adapt without external support and deliver benefits to large numbers of poor people in the future.
Programme interventions must develop systems by transforming the behaviours and practices of market players within them such that change lasts. Care must be taken not to distort the way those systems work, through actions that displace or bypass market players and the roles they need to perform, or that behavior to alter their behaviour and practices in ways that aren’t appropriate or sustainable.
The way in which programmes engage with and support market players determines how successful they are in stimulating lasting behaviour change. Understanding incentives and taking them seriously must precede intervention
Interventions should support relevant market players to innovate and perform more effective roles and empower them to maintain and adapt those improvements in the future. To do this, programmes must be adept to engaging with a variety of market players knowing when to enter and exit partnerships, gauging whether players genuinely ‘own’ changes promoted, and assessing whether the system is really changing.
Programmes will often work closely with individual market players to understand market dynamics and test whether or not necessary behaviour and practice changes can endure. At other times programmes must work with a diversity of players to encourage behaviour and practice changes to deepen a broaden market system responses and improve the functioning of supporting systems
The Systemic Change Framework helps programmers determine the extent to which market players have reacted to interventions. It helps programmes assess and measure how systems, and the players within them, change over time and guide them on where and with whom to intervene next. The intervention process can be broken down into two main steps:
Step 1: Conduct and review pilot interventions:
Engage appropriate market players as partners to promote the adoption of innovations and more effective roles that result in pro-poor changes in the market system
Step 2: Conduct supplementary interventions that stimulate crowding-in:
Develop supplementary partnerships to increase the scale of outreach and improve other functions and rules that support piloted innovations, to enhance responsiveness and sustainability