Designing transformative development interventions

This briefing from the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) introduces a multidisciplinary toolkit designed to create more effective development interventions by combining service design, complex adaptive systems thinking, and behavioural science. The approach aims to move beyond the dichotomy of top-down and bottom-up strategies through a highly iterative, seven-stage process that emphasizes stakeholder co-definition and rapid prototyping.

• The SEI proposes a new research approach for development interventions that integrates service design, complex adaptive systems thinking, and behavioural science to address complex and intractable problems. This model is intended as a template for practitioners, researchers, and programme implementers to ensure interventions are "effective, efficient and equitable".
• The toolkit employs a non-linear, iterative seven-stage process to design interventions that require behaviour change. The stages are: 1) Problem co-definition to challenge assumptions; 2) Actor-centred mapping of socio-economic and ecological dimensions; 3) Experience-based problem diagnosis; 4) Rapid prototyping to validate solutions; 5) Intervention design; 6) Intervention testing (preferably via controlled field trials); and 7) Scaling up, which involves repeating previous stages to incorporate new information.
• The framework is designed for efficiency, with stages one through five typically completed in less than one month of fieldwork. A standard research team for this process usually consists of 5 to 10 lead researchers and a similar number of translators or local research assistants.
• Application of the toolkit with mango farmers in Kenya's Tana River County and Meru County revealed a misalignment between funder goals and farmer needs. While funders aimed to introduce technologies to increase fruit quality, the toolkit identified that farmers actually prioritized increasing the quantity of fruits because they lacked markets that provided higher returns for quality.

APA

Lambe, F., & Osborne, M. (2019). Designing transformative development interventions. Stockholm Environment Institute. https://www.sei.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/1900923a-gill-osborne-behaviour-and-choice-brief-1904a-web-1.pdf

Chicago

Lambe, Fiona, and Matthew Osborne. Designing transformative development interventions. Stockholm Environment Institute, 2019. https://www.sei.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/1900923a-gill-osborne-behaviour-and-choice-brief-1904a-web-1.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Lambe |first1=Fiona |last2=Osborne |first2=Matthew |title=Designing transformative development interventions |publisher=Stockholm Environment Institute |date=September 2019 |url=https://www.sei.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/1900923a-gill-osborne-behaviour-and-choice-brief-1904a-web-1.pdf |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{lambe2019designing, author = {Lambe, Fiona and Osborne, Matthew}, title = {{Designing transformative development interventions}}, institution = {Stockholm Environment Institute}, year = {2019}, month = sep, url = {https://www.sei.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/1900923a-gill-osborne-behaviour-and-choice-brief-1904a-web-1.pdf}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }