'More Suchitoto: reinventing our community'

The innovation resulted from a process of analysis and mid-term evaluation with a strong focus on sustainability strategies and indicators in STRO’s Local Economy Development (LED) interventions in Central America.

This process revealed that almost all projects in Central America find themselves at the same level of methodological development. And are at the moment working towards achieving a wider participation from local communities through the creation of local business networks as a means of increasing impact and reaching sustainability.

Problem

Surprisingly, all the projects face the same sort of problem (varying in degree depending on local context): although they succeed in finding participants with a pioneer attitude, they struggle to engage people in the projects on a large scale, as soon as it opens to the community as a whole.

These unexpected findings bring up several questions, objected to internal discussion within STRO regional team and their local partners: Why does this happen? Why don’t people engage easily in activities that could be beneficial to them as well as to their families/community, even when they are aware of the benefits?

Expansion

On the other hand, what motivates people to engage occasionally and not consistently, although the conditions seem to exist for continuous participation? Are there internal resistances/barriers to expansion within local partners that have not been addressed yet? What could STRO and the local partners do differently, in order to succeed in scaling up innovations?

In this project STRO wants to create a new opportunity to learn and become much more effective in achieving our goals: supporting the creation and development of sustainable-resilient communities.

Innovation 

The proposed innovation consists of adapting and using a change model (The stages of change model, DiClemente). The model was initially developed to explain the process, in which an individual gets into and out of addiction. In this project the model will be used as an integral logical intervention framework for a local economic development project that include social innovations, in order to achieve greater involvement and ownership from the local community.

The core of this model is a simple idea: change is a process that doesn’t happen all at once; instead it occurs in increments of stages. The model provides a useful map of where people can be in their journey to change. This is one of the main reasons why it is widely used by the addictions treatment field. 

Behavioural change

According to the work of Prochaska and DiClemente (1986), behavioural change follows a cyclical or spiral pattern comprising of five distinctive stages: pre-contemplation (awareness of need to change), contemplation (increasing the pros for change and decreasing the cons), preparation (commitment and planning), action (implementing and revising the plan) and maintenance (integrating change into lifestyle).

So understanding these different stages makes it easier to see what might be blocking the participation and ownership of local communities in development projects, in particular those in the field of social innovations.

Built on understanding and recognizing the stages of (collective) behaviour change and the process of innovation diffusion, the project proposes tools and methodologies to address each of the phases. In this case, with particular emphasis on preparation and action and to some extent, maintenance - assuming that STRO has already developed tools/methods that effectively addressed the preceding stages (pre-contemplation and contemplation).