Wikipedia
SEED-SCALE describes a comprehensive theory of social change sometimes also categorized as social development theory. SEED-SCALE can be used both to tell how to implement change and/or it can be used to analyze social change. SEED-SCALE’s distinguishing feature is its focus on human energy as the primary currency that causes people to change behaviors.
Normative thinking is that by allocating money to social programs (funding a health service, starting a micro-finance program, providing subsidies for agriculture, etc.) that intentional social action happens. SEED-SCALE does not deny the impact of budget driven projects. However, it suggests that a more available and sustainable approach is redirecting how people apply their energies. “Money is powerful because other people want it… This means, among other things, that if it is taken to be the central factor in social change initiatives, those who do not have it (including countries, including people—the people who need it most) are powerless.”
SEED-SCALE notes that human energy is a resource that is already present, already being used in every community in the world. If the community exists, it has energy. The opportunity is to use that resource more effectively. There are many types of relevant human energy: individual labor, cooperation, creativity, monitoring, learning, and the like. SEED-SCALE is an application of emergence within Complexity Theory, articulating how social change "emerges" with socio-economic development specific to each context of society, economics, and natural environment shaped by the interaction of these relationships; noting that the socio-economic product is not the result of inputs to the system (classical development thinking) but is the result of how relationships form within the system as a result of principle interaction ( emergence).
SEED-SCALE builds out of the most forward economic thinking, such as former World Bank economist, Paul Collier, “change in societies at the very bottom must come primarily from within.” Professor Dani Rodrik at Harvard, frames economic growth at the scale level as a consequence of growth aggregated from the local level, growing within the existing larger framework. Local growth occurs not because of inputs from outside but because it has figured out how to occur within the local situation of policies, stimuli, and resources.