129 8 Scaling-up Community Efforts to Reach the MDGs - An Assessment of Experience from the Equator Prize

Document begins: 129 8 Scaling-up Community Efforts to Reach the MDGs ­ An Assessment of Experience from the Equator Prize Michael Hooper, Rubab Jafry, Matthew Marolla and Josselin Phan, Equator Initiative, UNDP The MDGs will only be achieved community by community, family by family, and individual by individual.1 1. INTRODUCTION With the emergence of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) as a guiding framework for development assistance, considerations of the role to be played by communities have increasingly focused on scaling-up. At the environment/poverty interface, a growing emphasis on communities as drivers of sustainable development has been accompanied by extensive discussion of how local capacities might be built and community best practices scaled-up. The reality is, however, that these discussions have not led to an improved understanding of what it means to `scale-up', and the 1. Mark Malloch Brown, UNDP Administrator 130 relationship between capacity development, scaling-up, and MDG achievement remains murky and largely uninvestigated. Chapter 8 At least some of the lack of clarity surrounding the issue of scaling-up comes from the fact that the role of communities in both conservation and development has undergone rapid change over a short period of time. Until recently, conservation and development were frequently ...