SSIR | Does Everything in the Social Sector Need to Scale?

by Tanya Kak

For at least two decades, one question has structured much of how philanthropy and the social innovation ecosystem think about change: Can it scale? The question appears in grant applications, accelerator programs, and strategy documents. It makes sense: If a solution works for one community, surely the ethical imperative is to help many more? In a world of vast unmet needs, scale promises efficiency, reach, and speed.

Yet something curious has happened as this logic has spread. Increasingly, promising ideas, organizations, and forms of collective action are all filtered through the same lens, held to the same standard. If it cannot scale, why would it be worth investing in?

This assumption has reshaped the architecture of civil society. It has influenced what kinds of organizations get funded, what kinds of knowledge are valued, and even how social problems themselves are defined. But as geopolitical instability grows, inequality deepens, and social systems fracture in new ways—as the world, in short, ceases to behave like a scalable system—it is time to ask the uncomfortable question: Must all social innovation be designed to scale? Where does “scale thinking” make sense, and where must we re-imagine our way of thinking about progress and innovation?

When Scale Is the Only Default Logic

Scale has become such a powerful organizing idea in philanthropy and development because, at its core, scale thinking is built around growth: the idea that a successful system is one that can reach far more people without a proportional increase in resources. In this framing, the most valuable solutions are those that can expand rapidly while maintaining efficiency. Measurement therefore becomes inseparable from design. If growth is the goal, the ability to demonstrate growth, through metrics such as users reached, households served, hectares restored, or units delivered, becomes central to how value is assessed.

This orientation toward scale has deep roots in development practice. Over the past three decades, governments and development institutions have increasingly searched for replicable models that can be transferred across geographies. Microfinance is one of the most cited examples. What began as locally embedded lending groups evolved into large-scale financial systems serving millions of clients worldwide, supported by standardized metrics such as repayment rates and borrower numbers.

These proof points have guided many of the trends that we now see around scale thinking in the social sector. If an intervention works in one place, the next question quickly becomes whether it can be replicated elsewhere at scale.

Yet researchers studying social innovation suggest that impact spreads through multiple pathways. They distinguish between scaling out (replication across sites), scaling up (influencing policies and institutions), and scaling deep (shifting relationships, cultural norms, and local practices). Other scholars describe scaling wide, where ideas spread through decentralized networks rather than a single expanding organization.

Each pathway has its own role to play. However, operational demands of scale thinking require one to think about some of the building blocks consistently: replicability, standardization, and measurable outputs. The implication is often that complex social processes may need to be simplified into stable models that can travel across contexts, often referred to as “datafication of civil society” by sociologists.

In practice, this can shape which kinds of solutions are prioritized, which organizations receive support, and how social problems themselves come to be defined.

Community organizing, collective stewardship, and cultural shifts rarely translate into easily tracked metrics. For example, take the case of watershed restoration. Building check dams and recharge structures can scale quickly across districts and produce impressive numbers, such as hectares treated and structures built. But whether those gains last often depends on something less visible: local agreements about groundwater use, crop choices in dry years, or who decides when a borewell goes deeper. These decisions are negotiated through trust, local institutions, and leadership within communities. Often harder to count, but they often determine whether resilience endures.

The question, then, is what do we stand to lose if scale thinking becomes the predominant lens of looking at social change? When scalability matters, what kinds of change can it meaningfully carry? What might progress look like if impact were judged not only by how far a solution travels, but also by how well it strengthens the systems around it: the communities, ecosystems, and institutions that allow change to endure?

A World That No Longer Behaves Like a Scalable System

The limits of scale thinking are becoming clearer as the world itself becomes less predictable. Climate volatility, geopolitical fragmentation, and economic shocks are producing systems that behave less like stable machines and more like living ecosystems. In such conditions, solutions designed once and replicated everywhere can quickly reach their limits. What communities need is the capacity to adapt: to learn, reorganize, and respond as circumstances change.

Societies rarely transform through replication alone. Change more often emerges from ecosystems of actors, relationships, and institutions that learn, negotiate, and adapt within specific places. When innovation begins with the realities of people and landscapes, rather than with the assumption that solutions must scale, different possibilities come into view.

For philanthropy, the task may not be to simply support what works at scale, but to cultivate the conditions in which many forms of change can take root. One way to think about this is through navigation. In uncertain waters, ships matter. But ships alone cannot chart the course. They rely on lighthouses that illuminate shifting terrain and bridges that connect otherwise isolated efforts. Civil society increasingly needs this kind of infrastructure: institutions that help actors see the landscape clearly and work together across it. Yet philanthropy still tends to fund the ships (the organizations delivering visible programs) while the quieter systems that help the fleet navigate together remain underbuilt.

What Philanthropy Can Do Differently

1. Fund the bridges. Philanthropy can invest more deliberately in social infrastructure: convening platforms, shared governance systems, and knowledge networks that allow many actors to collaborate. The Ecological Restoration Alliance, for instance, brings together restoration practitioners, scientists, and community organizations to develop shared protocols and learning systems across landscapes. Rather than scaling a single organization, the alliance strengthens the field’s ability to act collectively.
2. Back technology that communities steward. Digital platforms can scale while still centering community agency. The local disaster mapping effort in Indonesia, which builds on participatory disaster-mapping approaches pioneered by platforms like PetaBencana, enables citizens to report hazards in real time and contribute to open disaster maps used by communities and governments. The technology works precisely because it is co-designed with users and embedded in local response systems rather than imposed from above.
3. Invest in the commons. Shared resources such as open data systems, restoration protocols, training networks, and collaborative tools often act as the soil from which innovation grows. One example is CoRE Stack, developed by the Commons Tech Foundation, which provides open, modular digital infrastructure designed specifically for community-led organizations. Rather than building proprietary platforms, CoRE Stack focuses on shared digital public goods, identity systems, registries, consent layers, and governance protocols that many actors can adapt for their own contexts. Funding such commons-based infrastructure enables diverse organizations to collaborate and innovate without each having to build their own technology from scratch.
4. Build the missing middle. Between grassroots organizations and large global institutions sits a fragile but critical layer of intermediaries: regional networks, knowledge hubs, and field-building organizations that translate ideas across contexts. These actors mentor emerging groups, document learning, and maintain collaboration across ecosystems of practice. For example, the Consortium for Agroecological Transformation exemplifies this approach by supporting networks of farmers, researchers, and grassroots organizations to transition agricultural landscapes toward agroecology.

Looking Beyond Scale

Scale thinking has its place. Some challenges, such as mass vaccination campaigns, disaster early-warning systems, or digital infrastructure for financial inclusion, depend on solutions that can move rapidly across vast populations.

But many of the transformations we now seek from restoring degraded landscapes to rebuilding social trust do not travel in quite the same way. They are shaped slowly on the ground: through experiments that falter before they succeed, through neighbors learning how to respond together in moments of stress, and through local civil society organizations that stay present long after the urgency of a crisis fades. Over time, these everyday negotiations over water, livelihoods, risk, and responsibility begin to form something more durable. Because when crises arrive, systems rarely rise to the occasion overnight; they rise to the level of readiness that has quietly been built in ordinary times, through relationships, trust, and shared norms.

In a world defined by complexity and uncertainty, the task ahead may lie as much in cultivating these enabling conditions as in expanding solutions themselves—strengthening the lighthouses and bridges that help the whole fleet find its way.

First Published in the SSIR