As a field, systems development is good at working out what good practice looks like. I know because I have been leading systems development programs for over 20 years. Failure is rarely due to a lack of technical skill. Instead, it tends to come down to poor management through the stages of learning what works, scaling up, and leaving a better, more inclusive and resilient system behind. We have the knowledge, but we don’t have…

A recent trip to Malawi challenged my assumptions about what climate adaptation looks like and convinced me that the development sector needs a serious rethink on how it approaches scale.