Partnerships for Social Development: A Casebook (Johns Hopkins Department of International Health & Future Generations, 1994)

This, the first SEED-SCALE publication, states in its Conclusion: “Our most important conclusion was that successful and sustainable social development is possible. … Universal commonalities to successful social development are: centrality of community, potential of partnerships, and demonstrations can go to scale. … Key values recur in successful social development, the most important of which is the primacy of equity. … Wherever it succeeds, social development is complex and interdependent.”

Empowerment on an Unstable Planet: From Seeds of Human Energy to a Scale of Global Change. This book is about solutions for all: all people, across the entire planet. When all are not advancing, humanity is dividing. Recent global economic failures have not only increased the proportion of the disadvantaged, but also made clear the tenuousness of current prosperity. Such vulnerability is echoed in the reality of major climate change and the probability of pandemics. Denial is an option, as is living in hope of technological remedies, or attempting to change regulatory systems. But such responses duck the fact that until solutions start reaching all they limit the likelihood of truly solving the underlying conditions. We need a process that changes the fundamentals of our response capacity, and we need to start using this process now.

The good news is that in pursuing opportunity for all those of us who have achieved the good life do not need to give it up. Instead, we can continue to improve—but to do so we need to more systematically use our most plentiful base of change: our human energy. We increasingly try to do everything with money, which is a scarce commodity. Indeed, its efficacy is predicated upon its scarcity. However, as this book will argue, a currency is available that is underutilized and universally present: the energies of people. Simply put, deep, fundamental change in our lives happens because of what people do, people making use of what they have, where they are, today.

Once its potential is understood community-based growth can grow very quickly as people teach each other, as people hold each other accountable, and people daily act in adaptive decisions to respond to opportunities. Such growth, unlike many other approaches, does not begin with policy reforms by national governments, nor does it depend on the commonly assumed infusions of financial support, nor does it depend on technological innovations.6

There is an urgency to put in place such solutions. Riots and terror cells anywhere call forth our armies because those riots can spread and terror’s networks are as far-reaching as they are invisible. Epidemics today remind us that our children’s health is vulnerable to viruses in a pig in Mexico or in a chicken in China tomorrow. World finances sit exposed to computer hackers anywhere from across the ocean to down the block.

Global climate change, more serious and more certain every year, is producing natural systems that are less reliable and ever more prone to destructive extremes. Clearly, the traditional solutions—technological fixes, gated enclaves of privilege, vaccines, armies, and regulatory systems—are inadequate. Terrorism can appear anywhere, mutations can occur at any time among any population, and armies increasingly cause civilian casualties that transform military victories into quagmires in which soldiers come to fight not an enemy but a population. In the modern world, isolation behind gates, borders, or conference rooms is both ineffective and ethically bankrupt. All life rides into the future together on a planet increasingly defined by instability.

A dual-pronged challenge lies before us. Undeniably there has been progress—five out of seven humans have a better shot at life than did their grandparents. But the systems improving the conditions of human existence are working at only two-thirds capacity, as the numbers excluded grow and the gulf separating the prosperous from the destitute yawns ever wider. Furthermore, the vast experiment of industrial modernity that humanity has pursued since the late eighteenth century has wreaked havoc upon the ecosystems on which it depends, and now threatens to choke the planet itself with steadily rising effluence. The processes for advancement in the twenty-first century need to evolve in such a way that they no longer contain within them inherent processes of planetary destruction and human destitution.

Many development projects speak of “empowering the people” and “growing capacity in communities,” yet this well-intentioned language too often remains only that. Genuine human progress involves the use of human hands, hearts, and minds to do what we can with what we have, here, today. Every human being, even the most impoverished, has a portion of discretionary energy to direct. Begin with that, grow it. Impoverished Indian villagers could place one foot in front of the other to follow the Mahatma on the salt march to the sea; they could guide thread over a wooden spindle; they could refuse to eat. Such simple actions grew to overpower an empire, and once-marginalized people gained the freedom of aspirations for the future. The real meaning of freedom that Gandhi was pursuing has been lost in the histrionics of democracy.

Using their own energies, people can overthrow their burdens and attain such multifaceted freedoms without consuming or selling off their scarcest resources. Working in partnership with their governments and the experts they can access, they can start to build on what they already have. Then, much as economic growth compounds profits, communities compound this resource so that benefits accrue to all. Economists term this “a process of increasing returns.” In the process advocated here, the returns come in the form of compounding human energy rather than money. Examples in this book demonstrate increasing returns growing in very challenging places: among them saving thousands of children from dying in India, protecting six million acres around Mount Everest in China and also promoting peace in Afghanistan.

This alternative thesis to today’s dominant paradigm runs counter to the dominant understanding in which the foundation of societal advancement is seen to be economic growth—that profits from economic growth provide the basis for improving health, education, physical security, even the environment. There is no doubt that economic growth can generate surpluses that then allow society to invest in itself. However, this truth is not universal; economic growth does not benefit all people. It lifts some, at times lifts even most, but by its very nature it thrives on disparity; it benefits some more than others. Those who already have get more, while those with nothing to invest are left behind. To make money you need money, natural resources, or other people’s labor to exploit. This mode of advancement works for those who possess one of these resources—and it works best for those with all three. But it does not work for all.

The emphasis on economic growth has had a destructive dynamic for communities. As economist Stephen Marglin insightfully states, “Undermining community is the logical and practical consequence of promoting the market system.” The market system is based on the expectation that individuals will act in rationally calculating self-interest, but the consequence is competition that pulls communities apart. Communities are the organizational structure humans have worked within over millennia to channel and apply their energy. What is needed is a process of community-strengthening through which individuals are supported.

Community, as we use the term, is any group that has something in common and the potential for acting together. It is a three-way partnership of people with their governments and with those outside who have an interest in people’s well-being. It is large enough to resist exploitation and small enough that each individual has a voice in shaping life’s impact on him- or herself. This way of using the term community allows its extension across geographical locations, as occurs with professional or ethnic communities, and, increasingly, through the Internet. We go to war and die for community; when we die for ourselves there is no future. A sense of community turns members from behaving in only individual interest to putting in place networks of relationships that support all.

Above Paragraphs From
Empowerment on Unstable Planet (Introduction)
Authors: Daniel C Taylor, Carl E Taylor & Jesse O Taylor
Oxford University Press 2012

Excerpted from Chapter 1

SEED-SCALE describes how aspirations, one of the most powerful of human energies, can be harnessed. A dynamic, which we call the revolution of rising aspirations, connects aspirations and actions in a feedback loop. What people desire leads to action, which in turn leads to new aspirations. Thus, opportunity for better lives is available to everyone. It does not require a resource that people do not have, or special technologies. Better lives are possible by humans learning to utilize what they have more effectively; they can learn that now, and apply it anywhere.

Although technology is impressive, the key to building better lives is not a series of technical breakthroughs, but changes in peoples’ behavior. This is a book about how to change the way we behave. First, we must see that a more just and lasting change is possible. Illustrating that is one feature of this volume, which is a set of demonstrations, but it also shows how to achieve a more just and lasting future. Undergirding all such people-led transformations are four principles:

1. Build from success-give people a starting point that works, or an example.
2. Create a three-way partnership–use actions by people, arising from the bottom-up; engage change-agents, possessing ideas and training, from outside-in; and employ these actions within the top-down arenas of policies, values, and financing.
3. Decide based on evidence–utilize the facts of local reality that are driving decisions.
4. Change behaviors-reallocate roles, based on the functions needed.

 

These four principles all center on the objective of a rising quality of life. People do not want to give up aspects of the good life they already have–they want more. The first principle tells where to start. The second outlines the team. The third guides the journey. And the fourth points to what must be done–indeed, what everyone is capable of doing.

The opportunity now presented is to direct all of this to a more just and lasting future. Our world changes around us. To keep abreast, we continually adapt our needs to optimize all that is affecting the lives we lead to fit our circumstances. We change locally, but the new life-feature is that in doing so, we must take advantage of the changing global context. The world is now interconnected. Local scope is no longer adequate; we must engage globally but act locally.

Global engagement can be random, with victimization resulting from processes of entropy. Or this engagement can be done intentionally, which leads to local improvement by working with what’s working and using what is succeeding. The team to accomplish this is a three-way partnership, guided by facts that can cross factions and present an accurate understanding of the real world. Role reallocation results in more-effective behaviors.

Earlier efforts to define the dynamics of social change often failed, because they focused on one input, usually money (something that is hard to get); one kind of leadership (usually that of an expert, who might not know the local context); needs (which meant building from what was broken in the community); and a search for answers (i.e., “deliverables,” which often meant proof to a donor, rather than to the people affected by a change). Several principles are operating in such traditional social change: the expert knows best, direction comes from plans, people should focus on problems, and action is implemented through a resource people compete over.

But it is possible to have people direct themselves and take the complexities of local realities into account. Such bottom-up growth does not magically happen. Grass provides an analogy. For bottom-up growth from its roots, grass needs top-down nourishment from sun and rain and outside-in nourishment from soil micronutrients. Similarly, community growth requires a partnership. If done-by-themselves change was possible, then more communities, recognizing this self-interest, would have achieved their aspirations long ago.

Community (as we use the term) is any group that has something in common and has the potential to act together. Usually communities consist of people who live in a geographic region and interact as a cohesive unit. But there are other communities–unions, religious groups, ethnic alliances, and the like–that can also organize. Most people are members of multiple communities. A defining characteristic is that a community functions best if it is small enough so people either know or know about one another and can organize for joint action.

It is possible to build from one or several community-based projects and, using these as learning and extension centers, scale up across a region. SEED-SCALE advocates having this expansion happen by using larger regional frameworks to reinforce the local one. Thus, a community is being enabled by the system, not fighting it, so local solutions self-assemble across the region. This internal-growth approach contrasts with methods that seek changes driven by external funding and prescribed solutions. It does not matter whether these external answers come from religious dogmas, international aid, Marxism, politicians seeking office, or even advertisements from the consumer society; external prescriptions increasingly bombard and are trying to change the local sphere.

Communities are continually being told what to do by many outside groups, and SEED-SCALE helps people productively engage these externalities. With their collective local energies, communities then allocate their local resources–and also interact with the global bombardments. And as communities get better with local allocation, they learn to engage the forces from outside more effectively. Over time, community-specific solutions build to a momentum strong enough to redirect the larger forces. Such community-specific growth occurs through an iteration of seven tasks.

We ride the socio-econo-info-biosphere together. We are in an age of rising risks. We need a mode of engaging challenges that is both reliable and affordable. Even wealthy societies are increasingly unable to care for their growing numbers of the poor, of alienated youth, of the forgotten elderly, of marginalized mothers, of the hostile homeless, and of exploited minorities. But every community has its priorities. This book advances a process through which local priorities can become the bases for global actions. In doing so, the socio-econo-biosphere starts to heal itself.

Authors: Daniel C Taylor and Carl E Taylor
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016

Community Based Sustainable Development: A Proposal for Going to Scale with Self-Reliant Social Development, Daniel C. Taylor & Carl E. Taylor (New York: UNICEF, 1995)

“This monograph brings together many years of experience in UNICEF and other agencies in promoting components of Sustainable Human Development. Area Based Programmes have tended to be successful in local areas but there have been problems in their not readily ‘going to scale.’ There are, however, examples of successful extension. In this volume, Drs. Daniel Taylor and Carl Taylor have made a worthy effort in drawing important lessons from such examples and proposed a set of measures that could guide future efforts. The process places special emphases on: equity, a long-standing UNICEF goal of reaching the unreached; adaptation and innovation under diverse local conditions; and capacity building through collaboration between communities, government officials, and experts.”
James P. Grant
Executive Director, UNICEF (1980-1995)