SUMMARY

Scale Up is a synthesis of the highlights of discussions of the 38 participants from some 25 institutions who attended the Workshop on Scaling Up Sustainable Agriculture (SA) Initiatives held 22-23 October 1999 at the World Bank. The Workshop was organized by the NGO Committee of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). The workshop report was prepared by the International Institute of Rural Reconstruction in the Philippines.

The workshop and its organizers started with a general assumption that there are successful local level SA initiatives which, although spreading on their own through the informal social structures, may be further expanded or scaled up with direct intervention. There are however institutional, political, technological and methodological factors that keep the scaling up activities from realizing its fullest potential of diversifying the benefits and spreading these benefits to more people more quickly. Overcoming these constraining factors is the overall challenge to the scaling up process.

The Workshop participants shared and discussed the current and emerging views on the process of scaling up based on their work and related experiences. These took off from looking into the factors and principles explaining success of local level initiatives and how these experiences may be extrapolated and then examining what impedes scaling up the experiences and how these may be overcome. As the meeting progressed, the discussions converged along two major sets of agenda. These are on (i) further clarifying scaling up concepts, approaches, principles and issues; and (ii) the role of CGIAR in the whole process of going to scale.

There was a general acceptance in the meeting that scaling up is not just about technologies but is more a development process of scaling up a vision starting from that of the farmers. It is a process for expanding learning and organizational/community capacities to identify and solve new and different problems and adapt to changing situations. It is expansion resulting from not just having more numbers and larger areas but also from evolving roles and responsibilities that go with improved capacities and diversification of benefits. In being able to carry on with the discussion on what else constitutes the scaling up process, participants had to go into clarifying concepts and definitions which the Workshop initially intended to bypass. Scaling up, scaling out and scaling down processes had to be differentiated but to later recognize that the up, out and down concepts in fact comprise particular sets of patterns in going to scale.

For many of the participants scaling up connotes a vertical movement of experience, knowledge, impact and effects higher up the levels organization of a sector or society. This implies involving more stakeholder groups up the ladder from farmers to extensionists and NGO workers to local officials, to researchers to policy makers/ministers to donors. Scaling out is horizontal spread within a sector, particularly farmers. Both scaling up and scaling out implies adaptation, modification and improvement (not just replication) of particular technologies and techniques but more importantly of principles and processes. Scaling down is more particular to the replication (for lack of a more appropriate term) of whole programs not just technologies or principles or processes by breaking them down into smaller programs or projects to facilitate planning, implementation and accountability at lower levels. Some see this as decentralization or devolution and therefore equate these processes with scaling out as well. In this document going to scale is used as the generic term comprising of scaling up, scaling out and scaling down. However, inasmuch as scaling up appears to be the more common terminology in use, it is used interchangeably with going to scale in this document.

In discussing the concepts associated with scaling up, at least five dimensions of scaling up emerged during the meeting. These included the institutional (vertical integration), the geographical/spatial (horizontal spread), the technological, the temporal and the economic or cost dimensions. In all these dimensions sustainability, participation and capacity building were common themes. Furthermore, the Workshop implied three general strategies adopted by an implementing organization in dealing with the issue of scaling up relative to how it conceptualized its project/program intervention. These were (i) spontaneous scaling up, (ii) scaling up after achieving initial local success, and (iii) inclusion of the scaling up plan right from the start of project.

In spontaneous scaling up there is no planned or direct intervention to bring the successful initiative beyond the project level. The intervention to spread the benefits more widely is at most limited to making sure that the material requirements for it to spread are easily available and accessible. The Green Revolution of the 1960s that emphasized seed dispersal approximates this strategic stance. Scaling up naturally happens as determined by market forces and the informal social structures and/or because other organizations take it up for piloting elsewhere with the intention of going to scale. The latter already comprises the second strategic option ñ scale up an initiative or an innovation that has already achieved pilot/local level success. The innovation may come from other organizations or from the organization itself but the main contention is that planning to scale up is not initiated unless there is proof of local success.

A third strategy is to plan to scale up beginning from the time the project is conceptualized. This may be in one of these two ways. The first is somewhat similar to the second strategic stance of starting small/at the local level before scaling up, except that the plan to scale up is already integrated into the intervention. The second is to begin big or to start big and at the top like the FAO experience with the Farmersí School System where the program started at the ministerial level, piloted in several communities and then scaled down into smaller programs/projects for horizontal expansion.

The availability of external funds or the capacity of the organization to access external funding has an influence on the choice of strategy. If core and unrestricted funding is available then it can plan to scale up from the start. If funding is contingent to demonstration of impact, then the initiative is scaled up once successful. If funding is not expected after the initial support for one reason or another, the tendency is to let the innovation scale up on its own ñ spontaneous diffusion.

In the discussion of the approaches and principles that will help guide an organization in implementing its scaling up plan, the long list generated in the Workshop may be broken down into eight general categories. These are action research and learning, human relationship building, local capacity building and resource mobilization, market development, participation, policy change and development, strategic alliances and training and extension. With respect to tools and methods these fall along these three main groups: (i) learning, sharing and solidarity building tools mostly found in the farmer-to-farmer approaches; (ii) commitment and consensus building instruments notably the signing of agreements and multi-sector ìroundtableî discussions; and (iii) planning and management tools like geographic information systems and participatory monitoring and evaluation.

 In spite of the development and availability of a wide range of tools and methods and richness in terms of approaches and principles, the process of going to scale remains a hurdle. The Workshop discussions point to at least five sets of issues and challenges to suggest why this is so. These are in terms of being able to (i) manage the diversity of situations relative to methods, nature of stakeholder groups, community/environmental and institutional settings, etc.; (ii) systematize and extrapolate successful experiences to be able to ìmake the jumpî from local/project level operations to scaled up operations; (iii) engage in more relevant strategic research particular within a research-and-development framework; (iv) develop the market for SA products i.e. not only in terms of convincing farmers but also consumers about the value of SA practices; and (v) measure the costs and demonstrate impact to more effectively influence those higher up the hierarchy.

Under the current set up of the CGIAR several participants felt that a way to get the CG involved in the scaling up agenda is through research ñ more specifically to come out with one big, ambitious project that cuts across the various issues and challenges raised during the Workshop. Research topics suggested by participants to be proposed to CGIAR include
(i) the entry points and sequence of interventions in the scaling up process, (ii) research on policies relevant to scaling up and
(iii) consumer-based research to gain consumer support for SA. Meanwhile this Scale Up document is an input to the continuing discussions of CGIAR on SA and natural resource management, to the Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR) and to the planned follow up workshop in the Philippines in April 2000 to be organized by the IIRR on behalf of the CGIAR NGO Committee and the GFAR. Unlike the Washington Workshop on which this report is based where emphasis has been on concepts and principles and field experience-based strategies and approaches, the follow up workshop is to examine specific case studies along themes and issues that have emerged from the first workshop.