Scaling Up the Impact of Development Programs Must Complement Other Approaches to Achieve the SDGs and Climate Goals

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – the forerunners of the SDGs – were approved in 2000 by the UN for implementation by 2015. At that time I served as Vice President for the Europe and Central Asia Region in the World Bank. I recall that the Bank’s leadership somewhat reluctantly endorsed the MDGs and that managers put up big banners listing the MDGs in their meeting rooms proclaiming the centrality of the MDGs. However, World Bank management and staff then mostly forgot about the MDGs in their consultations with governments, in the appraisal, supervision and evaluation of projects funded by the World Bank, and in much of their analytical work at country and global level.

One might conclude that those were the bad old days, or that it was just the World Bank ignoring the MDGs. However, this is not the case. Over the last 20 years, I have worked with many development organizations and interacted with governments and private sector actors. I was involved in the preparation, or review of country strategies programs and projects supported by multilateral and bilateral official development agencies, including the African Development Bank, Australian Aid, Germany’s GIZ, IFAD, UNDP, USAID and the World Bank. I also consulted with international operating NGOs, including Heifer International and Save the Children, and with foundations, including the Eleanor Crook Foundation[1]. In addition, I reviewed the relevant development effectiveness and evaluation literature (Hartmann and Linn 2008, Linn 2011) and participated in the activities of the Scaling Community of Practice over the last eight years. My conclusion is that there remains a yawning gap between the high-level declarations of support for the SDGs and the development programs and projects that are being implemented on the ground. In my experience, these projects rarely focus on linking the project goals, design, implementation and evaluation systematically and effectively with the long-term development goals, including the MDGs and SDGs.

Why are there such gaps between the SDGs, and achieving the goals, and bottom-up development projects and programs? A principal reason, in my opinion, is a preoccupation in development and climate circles with innovation as the preferred response to the challenge of development and climate change, noted in Section 5 above. The seemingly more mundane task of taking successful innovations to scale was left largely to chance, in part perhaps because in the commercial sphere, scaling appears to happen spontaneously, when of course that is not the case. Private firms spend much effort and large sums not only on innovation (research and development), but on market and supply chain research, on creating demand through advertising and promotion, on developing optimal production processes that raise quality while containing costs, on adapting products to meet evolving consumer preferences, and on mobilizing financing to support their scaling pathways. However, even in commercial scaling the difficulties of traversing the well-known “valley of death” in the early phases and of reaching customers of the “last mile” are well known, as various obstacles, including unfavorable cost structures and customers’ limited ability to pay, lack of suitable financing, government policies and regulations, etc. get in the way (Agapitova and Linn 2016).

A second reason – and one that is particularly dominant for externally, donor funded projects and programs – is the fact that development project design and implementation typically focus on getting the project or program started and funded, on implementing it according to agreed specifications and over a limited time 3–5-year time horizon, and on achieving whatever impacts the project promised to deliver. This is certainly a desirable aspect of project management, but it is not enough if one wants to make sure the project or program contributes meaningfully to the achievement of longer-term development and of climate goals at national, regional or global scale, including the SDGs. One must also ensure that a successful project or program creates the platform for subsequent sustainable scaling of development and climate impact along a pathway that is explicitly linked to an appropriate SDG or climate target. When this longer-term focus on sustainable scaling towards the SDGs is not built into project design and implementation, the development process remains stuck in one-off projects, in ‘pilots-to-nowhere’, in magical thinking where just because a project works, others – someone, whoever – will pick it up, will replicate or scale it[2]. And, therefore, it should not come as a surprise that development and climate investments bear only limited fruit and thus contribute to the shortfall in the achievement of the SDGs  and climate targets.

Of course, there are exceptions to the conclusion that development and climate innovation and projects do not pay adequate attention to scaling. For example, there is the Chinese approach to development, which was widely based on experimentation with innovative solutions followed by systematic scaling of promising solutions, at times with external support, as in the case of the Loess Plateau development. (Moreno-Dodson ed. 2005, Mackedon 2012) Or take the Mexican conditional cash transfer program, Progresa-Oportunidades, which aimed for, and achieved, substantial reductions in poverty over decades of a systematically planned and implemented scaling process. (Levy 2006) Then there are the large-scale national development programs of the Indian government and of the Bangladeshi NGOs, BRAC and Grameen Bank. Moreover, some funder organizations have actively pursued scaling agendas, including vertical funds such as the GAVI, the Global Fund, the Green Climate Fund, and IFAD (Gartner and Kharas 2013), as well as programs in GIZ and USAID, albeit with varying degrees of sustained success. (Kohl 2022) But even where efforts have been, and are being made to scale up development solutions, they have generally been the exceptions and have not been directly linked to the SDGs, or, before them, to the MDGs, and the Paris Agreement climate goals.

A critical challenge therefore is to close the gap between the SDGs and development projects and programs that has been a key constraint to effective implementation of SDGs. The question is how to close this gap. As the earlier sections have demonstrated, hopefully, existing top-down approaches such as focusing on more funding, on tracking progress at global, national and local levels, and on supporting innovation are important. However, on their own they are not likely to succeed as long as a key instrument for action, namely the design and implementation of development and climate projects and programs, is not calibrated to focus systematically on achieving the enunciated long-term goals and targets. The answer then is to adopt a systematic approach to scaling the impact of proven interventions towards the achievement of one or more SDG(s). How this can be done is taken up in the next sections with a principal focus on a scaling approach for the achievement of the SDGs. A parallel argument can be made for the achievement of the climate targets but is not further pursued here.

[1] Publications based on this work include:  Linn et al. (2010), Hartmann et al. (2013), Linn (2015), Agapitova and Linn (2016), Begovic et al. (2017), Chandy and Linn (2011). For donor-supported programs, see Kohl (2022).

[2] For an example of such magical thinking, see Linn (2019). For climate finance projects the problem with traditional development project practices is reinforced by fragmentation and smaller development projects (see footnote 7, above and Cichocka and Mitchell 2022).