© Conservation International/photo by Benjamin Drummond
Who is Grow for?
Grow is primarily aimed at practitioners, planners, and donors who design and implement initiatives on the ground and seek to scale conservationinitiatives. There is a growing need to systematically include scaling considerations during conservation initiatives’ design and implementation. Grow provides a way for practitioners, planners, and donors to engage in a theory-informed process to design and implement initiatives to scale.
How to use Grow?
Grow is designed to provide step-by-step guidance for designing and implementing initiativesto scale.Grow should be considered alongside Catalyzing conservation at scale: A practitioner’s handbook. This handbook details the conceptual framework, factors influencing adoption, andcaveats.
You will be asked to respond to a series of statements on the next page. Each statement considers one attribute from the Diffusion of Innovations framework that influences scaling (see Theory). Depending on your responses, you will be provided with prompting questions to help you think through ways of strengthening the scalability of your initiative.
While not all attributes may be applicable under all contexts and for all initiatives, the tool allows the user to reflect on areas that need further engagement, those that can be modified, and those that cannot.
Furthermore, you should consider who is in the team that is using Grow to evaluate an intervention. Ideally, the team should include representatives from diverse actor groups who will be affected by scaling decisions?
How not to use Grow?
Not all initiatives should or can be scaled. This is especially true for initiatives designed or emerging invery uniquecontexts or where scaling an initiative might cause harm to people or nature.
The diversity of initiatives, adopters, and context increases the complexity of applying common frameworks. Since this theory has been tested across diverse fields and for various applications such as health policies, communication, agricultural technologies, and global policies, we hope this conceptual framing is broad enough to apply to a majority of conservation initiatives.
The attributes you will be asked to consider are designed to prompt discussion and further investigation and is not meant to be a prescriptive tool;Growis a tool to help you start thinking about the scalability of your initiative.
Key concepts in Grow
The act of the “adopter” deciding to partake in a new initiative, whether by signing a contract, implementing an action, buying a product, or changing behavior.
The process by which “prior adoption of a trait or practice in a population alters the probability of adoption for remaining non adopters.”
Policies, programs, or projects designed for climate mitigation, conservation, restoration, or sustainable livelihoods.
Policies, programs, or projects (initiatives) perceived as new by the adopter.
Expanding, adapting, and sustaining initiatives in different places and over time.
References
1 Rogers, E. M. Diffusion of Innovations. 5th edn, 1-576 (Simon and Schuster, 2003).
2 Jagadish, A., Mills, M. & Mascia, M. B. Catalyzing conservation at scale: A practitioner’s handbook (version 0.1). (Conservation International and Imperial College London, Arlington USA and London, UK, 2021).
3 Strang, D. Adding social structure to diffusion models: An event history framework. Sociological Methods & Research19, 324-353 (1991). https://doi.org:10.1177/0049124191019003003