How Far Is the bank? Scale Up Strategies of Grassroots Innovation Movements - the Case of community Development Banks in Brazil

Abstract

Grassroots innovation is a way to approach technological, social, and environmental issues from the civil society, where the solutions for such issues are generated by themselves with its focus on the local perspective. When these innovations are organized to reach a larger audience they are often called Grassroots Innovation Movements (GIMs). This approach has gained significant attention from public sector, especially when it is not able to reach given areas with full capacity. In order to explore this growing interest, my inquiry is looking at how partnerships with the public sector influence and shape the scale-up strategies of Grassroots Innovation Movements. I use a framework of GIMs developed by Smith et al. (2017) as an analytical lens to discuss my empirical findings from the movement of Community Development Banks (CDBs) in Brazil.
My findings reveal that there are three main phases in the development of CDBs in Brazil. These phases embrace different contexts and frames, which directly influence the strategies developed to open new pathways for development. This study reveals the strategies developed by the movement of CDBs to tackle the challenges of scaling up to the national level, and how the partnerships with public sector shape them. My analysis points to the importance of transition periods between context shifts, and I argue that the reframing of these context shifts is essential on scaling up strategies. I further argue that these transition periods hold different opportunities for GIMs to act, based on the proactive or reactive nature of the movement’s behavior towards strategic actions. This process is especially important for GIMs, as this transitions are part of the challenge faced when the organizations fight for new pathways of development.