Transformative Change Making

Description

Max Saxer:

"Transformative Change Making (TCM) is a method to create maximum societal buy in for disruptive reforms. To achieve the ultimate objective of shifting the development path, the aim is to build a broad societal transformative alliance. By using a set of techniques to visualise the political playing field, TCM facilitates strategic debates over the best entry points, incentive structures and narratives to bring about change.

As long as key stakeholders see their interests best served in the status quo, it is very hard to build a broad societal coalition for change. The main challenge for change makers is then to sway some of these spoilers to embrace change. Stakeholders are unlikely to act against what they perceive to be in their best interest. However, people do not determine what is in their best interest in an isolated way, but within the echo chamber of their lifeworld. To be more precise, “what is happening” and “what can be said and done” is defined within their discourse community." (http://library.fes.de/pdf-files/bueros/indien/13269.pdf)

Principles

"When technological, economic or social changes are transforming society, but effective mechanism to shape these transformations are missing, crises can occur. Transformative Change Making (TCM) introduces a new method to create the societal buy-in needed to tackle such transformation crises.

• TCM uses a set of techniques to break social silos, makes use of

the knowledge disseminated through society, and visualises the challenges in the political field. TCM strengthens the ability of policy makers to reach out to constituencies, encourages private sector contribution to the common good, builds the strategic capacity of civil society and political literacy of all stakeholders.

• Making use of discourse steering as an instrument, TCM proposes

an alternative vision for a better tomorrow, constructs a credible change narrative and aims at creating success stories around catalytic projects.

• TCM has been successfully used to facilitate reform processes in

India, Pakistan, and Thailand. As a work in progress, it will be further adapted to match the local context. This beta version of the practical guide is meant to give practitioners an easy to use introduction into the method." (http://library.fes.de/pdf-files/bueros/indien/13269.pdf)

More Information

* Report: Practical Guide to Transformative Change Making. By Marc Saxer. Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, March 2017

URL = http://library.fes.de/pdf-files/bueros/indien/13269.pdf

• Discourse Community

Bibliography

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