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“This is the place-based scaling paradox: how to address common challenges with place-based solutions that can be scaled beyond place to contribute to larger-scale systemic change.”
Solutions to Scale
We work on community-engaged scholarship to develop the social infrastructure needed to resolve the place-based scaling paradox that impedes society-wide solutions to pressing social and environmental challenges.
What is the place-based scaling paradox?
Key challenges confronting society – food security, sustainability transitions, biodiversity conservation, resource conflicts, and others – are global in aggregation yet driven by dynamics that are specific to diverse places. Large-scale, top-down solutions are often ineffective and unsustainable because they are unable to account for place-based social and ecological diversity. In contrast, solutions have proven more effective when developed “in place” so as to be uniquely suited to the context of place. Yet the place-specific adaptations of these solutions that make them locally effective is also what prevents them from addressing systemic change at larger scales. This is the place-based scaling paradox: how to address common challenges with place-based solutions that can be scaled beyond place to contribute to larger-scale systemic change.
Resolving the place-based paradox
We are working collaboratively to develop “meso-level multipliers”: social infrastructure designed to mediate knowledge and activities within and between places. By drawing on a rich body of research in organization science on structures and processes that facilitate knowledge mobilization, strategic innovation, and new product development, we explore ways to embed these capabilities in the context of place-based communities. Doing so promises to enable an adaptive capacity to generate effective and scalable place-based solutions that can contribute to large-scale systemic change to benefit society and the environment.
“how to address common challenges with place-based solutions that can be scaled beyond place to contribute to larger-scale systemic change.“
Solutions to Scale
We work on community-engaged scholarship to develop the social infrastructure needed to resolve the place-based scaling paradox that impedes society-wide solutions to pressing social and environmental challenges.
What is the place-based scaling paradox?
Key challenges confronting society – food security, sustainability transitions, biodiversity conservation, resource conflicts, and others – are global in aggregation yet driven by dynamics that are specific to diverse places. Large-scale, top-down solutions are often ineffective and unsustainable because they are unable to account for place-based social and ecological diversity. In contrast, solutions have proven more effective when developed “in place” so as to be uniquely suited to the context of place. Yet the place-specific adaptations of these solutions that make them locally effective is also what prevents them from addressing systemic change at larger scales. This is the place-based scaling paradox: how to address common challenges with place-based solutions that can be scaled beyond place to contribute to larger-scale systemic change.
Resolving the place-based paradox
We are working collaboratively to develop “meso-level multipliers”: social infrastructure designed to mediate knowledge and activities within and between places. By drawing on a rich body of research in organization science on structures and processes that facilitate knowledge mobilization, strategic innovation, and new product development, we explore ways to embed these capabilities in the context of place-based communities. Doing so promises to enable an adaptive capacity to generate effective and scalable place-based solutions that can contribute to large-scale systemic change to benefit society and the environment.
