Are your actions developing or distorting the system
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 at 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 (see Adopt, Adapt below). At other times programmes must work with a diversity of players to encourage behaviour and practice changes to deepen and broaden market system responses and improve the functioning of supporting systems.
The Systemic Change Framework helps programmes 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 guides 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 the piloted innovations, to enhance responsiveness and sustainability.
