Should we move beyond ‘Field Building’?
Towards cultivating change ecosystems in place
In September 2023 we published a blog that explored some of our thinking (at that time) about growing social infrastructures to support place-based initiatives. More recently, we published the first in a three-part series exploring governance in and for complexity. In that second piece we outlined a draft typology to hone thinking around the roles and functions of systems shifting intermediaries. In this piece, we expand on the place-based theme and bring some of our thinking about ‘types’ of intermediaries to explore the current state of the place-based ecosystem in Australia and to offer some thoughts on ‘where to’ from here.
A decade of field building
Place-based work is not new in Australia (see for example Reddel, 2017), but it has experienced a renewed focus over the past decade or so through both policy development and the progress of a number of key place-based initiatives around the country. ‘Place-based work’ is positioned as both an approach and a programmatic frame for addressing complex issues in Australia. There are now a range of programs, projects, initiatives, funders, policy makers and researchers interested in place-based approaches and some promising outcomes are developing.
Supporting all this activity and interest, a number of ‘intermediaries’ have also been established around place-based work, collective impact and other ‘community-led’ approaches. In addition to supporting individual initiatives, these intermediaries are usually aiming to contribute to the broader development of knowledge, capabilities and other resources that can support place-based agendas. Some are also involved in fostering networks and coalitions designed to support systemic shifts that could help realise “equitable and durable outcomes at scale” (Farnham et al, 2020).
In effect, all the various actors involved are engaged in ‘field building’, that is they are part of . . .
“a community of organisations and individuals working together to solve a common set of problems, develop a common body of theory and knowledge or advance and apply common practices” (O’Neill, 2015).
Despite, or perhaps because of, all the activity in recent years we have also seen a contraction of diversity across the field — with certain methods (e.g. collective impact) becoming almost synonymous with the ‘field’ of place-based work.
Further, there remains a degree of fragmentation across this ‘field’. Whilst there is a universal recognition of the importance of collaboration in place-based work we have experienced undertones of organisational singularity and ‘hero’ narratives. These are sometimes also exacerbated by opaque relationships to power and unnamed issues of competition — particularly as newer actors move into established fields.
In the impact space, where everyone has great intentions and wants to maximise their contributions to better outcomes, even raising these issues can be difficult. So how do we move dialogue, policy and practice forward in this context?
Towards an ecosystem approach …
Drawing on the draft typology (mentioned above and developed in this piece, we suggest focusing attention on the range of intermediary roles and functions needed to drive change in complex contexts. In the ‘first cut’ typology we outline six of these (there may be more!), with ‘field building’ being just one.
Starting with this lens, below we start to imagine one possibility for moving from relatively fragmented field-building activities towards more emergent and integrative ecosystem-oriented approaches to supporting the development of place-based initiatives. As the Figure below suggests, we also think this perspective creates openings for the potential coming-together of a number of adjacent and complementary fields — and thereby opens up opportunities for the creation of a broader ‘ecosystem’ around place-based and community-led practice, policy and investment.
But firstly, what is the difference? Ecosystems are less focused on codifying practice and more on drawing together diverse actors and stakeholders to amplify and multiply value towards particular outcomes that require collaborative action. Intentional efforts using this approach would explore and unpack the potential for one or more platforms around which such ecosystems could develop. The shape, structure and realisation of any proposed platform or other organising approach should not be pre-determined but evolve out of the exploration.
This approach would require a more critical and engaged conversation about the complex relationships between ‘field’ actors than we are currently seeing in Australia. Shifting towards ecosystem approaches requires an openness to more nuanced understandings about how collaboration and competition play a part in change processes — and ultimately, will likely require a willingness for all to give up some part of their current functions and positioning in order to grow potential for stronger overall impacts in the ecosystem.
In commercial business contexts the use of ‘ecosystem’ concepts is expanding exponentially–(see for example, Grueler and Schneider, 2021), and often refers to a mixture of new models, platforms, and integrated commercial value chains that support multilateral partners to interact for broader value creation than can be achieved by any one business (see Adner, 2017). In the context of impact, we think it is more likely to refer to new organising frames, which focus on leveraging the power of the many in order to maximise and amplify potential for better outcomes (in this case, for people and places). Ecosystem approaches require rethinking the ways we can organise ‘assets’ — such as organisations, resources, people, knowledges and capabilities — to co-create new or better opportunities for impact.
Why ecosystems?
Ecosystem approaches challenge ‘old’ ways of generating change that rely on scaling singular institutions, or competitively dividing resources across various programs — as is often the result of a continual focus on reducing duplication as core to efficiency and effectiveness. Instead, the focus is on developing more fluid organising frameworks and more creative approaches to how value can be co-created. Necessarily this requires some focus on how a ‘commons’ of resourcing could be fostered in order to respond to complex social challenges. In an ecosystems approach there is also more focus on how multiple organisations can ‘amplify’ what works and innovate to adapt to different contexts and to changes in contexts, rather than ‘scaling’ or otherwise growing individual organisations.
In the context of place-based work, the potential benefits of an ecosystem approach could be:
- Testing of more diverse approaches to or applications of place-based work — particularly those that focus on larger or deeper challenges; like, for example, local care economies, or place-owned energy and communications infrastructures, or community-led approaches to adaptations to climate and biodiversity crises, to name just a few;
- Generating more focused, context relevant and detailed practice-based ‘evidence’ — that demonstrates what works in specific contexts or under certain conditions, rather than relying on the decontextualised or universalised ‘evidence’ methodologies that are characteristic of much policy and programmatic research. This may involve, for example, place-based data, collaborative analysis processes and development of joint actionable insights which could be tested across organisations and citizens;
- Fostering ‘amplification conditions’ — through providing greater opportunities for innovation in contexts that could enable communities to try, test and learn — and then share these learnings on platforms that connect them to other contexts, ultimately creating opportunities for innovation multiplier effects;
- Supporting the development of ‘learning cultures’ — increasing opportunities for diverse actors to collaborate and learn together through creating foundations for greater localised capability building and self-organisation.
Reframing Organising Relationships: The hard bits are also the bits that grow greater impact
Realising these benefits will require a shift in how we organise for collaboration, and in how we resource the (often invisible) activities and processes that are the life-blood of collaborative endeavours.
Understanding how more nuanced forms of relationships and organising frameworks can stimulate and amplify impact is critical to ecosystem approaches because core to such framings lies a commitment to collaborative rather than purely organisational goals.
In the context of place-based work, there are some enduring relational patterns that often keep us from exploring greater ranges and more diverse scopes for what happens between organisations, initiatives, actors and stakeholders. We suggest that unpacking and expanding these could help this growing ‘field’ edge towards the possibilities ecosystem approaches offer. Below we explore two examples of constricting relational patterns, and pose some opportunities that could improve the impact of place-based work in Australia through an ecosystem approach.
Competition AND collaboration . . .
Both competition and collaboration play a role in creating momentum towards any kind of collective purpose or goal. However, when new infrastructure and new resources are put on the table, there can be both explicit and implicit tendencies for actors to seek the security of quite a binary position — it’s either about collaboration OR competition and everyone chooses a ‘side’ (whether explicitly or implicitly).
In an ecosystem approach we need a more sophisticated understanding that both competition and collaboration are important and can co-exist across the ecosystem and amongst actors (See for example, Fuller et al, 2019 who explore this dynamic in business contexts). There will be areas in which ‘field’ organisations or initiatives compete; there will be areas where some entities are better placed than others to make a contribution (again, see the typology mentioned earlier for some starter thoughts that could help inform exploring this aspect); and there will be areas where collaboration will deliver better outcomes.
Beyond just getting more nuanced and transparent about the roles different actors could play in relation to these different modes, we also suggest and illustrate in the Figure below, that bringing an ecosystem lens can also help us to recognise and appreciate how these seeming opposites could be combined to create new perspectives and opportunities to support more transformational agendas.
Traditionally in social infrastructure the development focus centres on growth of individual entities or projects as the measure of success in efficiency and/or effectiveness — more programs, more projects and more entities (with the underlying assumption that more leads to better) — rather than looking at how each contributes to deepening outcomes, and then focusing on the nature of relationships between entities in pursuit of this purpose. It is much more about looking at the texture of the whole, and how the dynamics of competition and collaboration across the ecosystem could spark a broader generosity that contributes to better outcomes and deeper innovation that benefits people and places.
In this way, the focus shifts to how parts of the ecosystem relate as a whole and thereby contribute to a genuine ‘more than the sum of the parts’ approach.
Duplication is not all bad . . .
One of the perennial relational patterns we see when it comes to resourcing social infrastructure is the fear of duplication. Neoliberal fiscal policies seem to have rather successfully reduced understandings of duplication to a myopic focus on improving efficiency.
However, in complex systems (which Places are) duplication is not necessarily a bad thing and includes attributes critical for enabling innovation and experimentation within complex systems. Understanding the important role duplication can play, particularly in relation to overlaps and redundancy, is a key perspective shift needed to move towards an ecosystem approach. This includes exploring the deeper roles overlaps and redundancy can play — particularly around ensuring continuity and contextual relevance, enabling flexibility of responses to match the diversity of need and context, and providing enough ‘slack’ for innovation and creativity within an ecosystem (Hollander, 2010).
And a more nuanced understanding of ‘amplification’ is needed . . .
As well as reframing duplication, we suggest an ecosystem approach to achieving collaborative place-based goals requires intentional engagement with amplification agendas and methods. However, too often amplification is understood simplistically, as being just about ‘scaling’. In complex systems, amplification is not about more or bigger services, programs, or capability building — it is about complementarity, roles and niches within the existing ecosystem, and understandings of scale that go beyond scaling big and out, but also up and deep (for more on this, drawing from a specific context, see our earlier post on right scaling).
In the Figure below we visualise a different way of thinking about how the two connect — and what could be explored if their relational qualities were intentionally intersected. We suggest exploring, through practical test initiatives in Places, how these kinds of evolved relational patterns will offer many opportunities for improving understanding of place-based ecosystem dynamics.
Arguing for more nuanced approaches to duplication and amplification is not about just adding ‘more’ to an ecosystem. It is about intentionally creating connections between and across programs, initiatives, organisations and actors to create the conditions that support generating resilience and innovation. Restricting the focus to efficiency and scaling ‘designs in’ a ‘thinness’ to an ecosystem, which can lead to brittleness and fragility in and between the actors involved.
Conclusion
As the place-based ‘field’ in Australia matures and interest continues to grow, there are both significant opportunities and many challenges to face. To date, those interested in development have primarily focused on funding and otherwise supporting key intermediary entities — as this is one way to grow the field as a whole.
To move into a next phase, one that lifts the gaze towards an ecosystem approach, will require much more focus on actors demonstrating their value directly and in relationship to other entities with an interest in the collective purpose. Our hunch is that this would lead to a reshaping of the trajectories, landscape and the entities that make up the ecosystem. Critical questions that should guide this reshaping include the perennial ones — who makes the decisions, and how the ecology of actors is resourced and supported over time.
Acting on current political and other commitments to strengthen ‘community-led’ decision-making will require place-based ecosystems with capacity and capability to engage in the necessary processes (for two very different examples see: https://tinyurl.com/8u2pzdb4 and https://tinyurl.com/yc43nftk).
Realising the ambition that ‘community-led’ approaches offer will also require genuine engagement with and involvement of those at the heart of this work — the communities, the people, the places who are leading the practice. How much these influence and shape the goals and activities of ecosystem actors should be a key indicator by which we measure the effectiveness of the nascent field.
Contributors to this post
Prof Ingrid Burkett and A/Prof Joanne McNeill
References
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