When it comes to the adoption of solutions, we appear to be slow as hell.

But how do we fasten the pace without destroying the progress?

Hola! In this article, I reflect on the uncomfortable tension many of us hold - knowing that we need to shift our focus from scaling through growth or replication to scaling our ability to respond to local contexts and rhythms. I’m creating space for us to discuss how and why rather than rushing to expand solutions without considering their fit or true impact, we scale the capacity of individuals, communities, and businesses to adapt, learn, and evolve solutions that are rooted in context.

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Alongside feelings of pure love for life (my own, and the life that grows all around me), all sorts of ideas and questions have streamed through my mind each day as I sat beneath cacao trees with a machete in hand to clear weeds (absolute favourite tool, still dreaming about it…), or removed moss from coffee trees one branch at a time.

Ideas and questions that evolve through the challenge, insight, and encouragement of each of you. That’s why I wanted to share a few reflections ahead of next week’s Circular Economy Forum.

Amy responded to my reflections on The Cost of What We Consume: Why Circularity Starts with Global Solidarity to say she appreciated the idea that “the economy needs to reward generations instead of efficiency,” and asked:

“Where does degrowth fit in a circular economy? I think it’s more important than innovation.”

Degrowth - a word that makes me feel uncomfortable.

I spent time sitting with that allergic reaction. I realised it’s because the people I want (and need) to work with to change our supply chains and systems are the exact people who are often polarised by the word before they reach the concept. Even if Amy and I want the same thing - a net reduction in what we take, consume, and assume we ‘need’ - I feel more confident attracting business leaders into project outcomes that include “innovation” and “new business models” than anything framed as “degrowth.”

But Amy’s question didn’t just challenge my thinking. It reframed it. It shifted my focus from what circular solutions promise at scale to what they might quietly erase along the way.

In other words, what roots might we sever in our rush to achieve results?

Next week, one of the Circular Economy Forum (WCEF2025) accelerator sessions is:

Shaping Circular Food Futures: A Multi-Stakeholder Approach to Scale Up Innovations

Hosted by World Resources Institute, Africa, alongside regional and global partners, the session will showcase circular food solutions across Africa and Latin America and ask what kind of collaboration it takes to scale them.

Because I hold the belief that all the solutions we need already exist, we’re just missing the connections within our systems to make them work - I LOVE thinking about scaling. I’d usually be focusing all of my attention on capturing the action points.

But the farms and forests I’ve lived and worked in these past months, alongside Amy’s reminder to take degrowth more seriously, have helped me see the session in a new light.

In a world that rewards speed and scale, maybe what we actually need to make progress is to first ensure we’re paying attention.

When it comes to scaling innovations, now I’m wondering:

1. Are the innovations scaling up or down our total consumption?

2. Can we scale at the pace of the people and practices caring for the land?

3. When it comes to collaboration - who holds the pen?
   

Each of these are uncomfortable challenges I’ve come up against in multiple contexts, but I never feel confident in how to approach them. As you read through, I’d love to know, do you feel that familiar uncomfortability too?

1. How do we design for new (old) rhythms?

The uncomfortable challenge:

We design funding and innovation cycles to suit the growth expectations of investors and institutions—not the seasonal, often-chaotic or slower rhythms of land.

What I’ve been witnessing:

The timing of a harvest doesn’t wait for your conference. The window to trial something new rarely aligns with quarterly reporting. Some days, farmers find a quiet hour to research an idea. Other weeks, they’re barely keeping ahead of the rain, the weeds, or the harvest.

I’ve seen and heard of this pattern many times - how the unpredictable window where someone has space to engage with new techniques often misaligns with the deadlines imposed by institutes or investors.

I wonder:

What if our timelines for innovation matched the rhythms of land, not the pace of markets?

What if we designed around the truth of slow growth, sudden storms, and people doing four jobs at once?

2. Can we scale without losing local wisdom?

The uncomfortable challenge:

Scaling is seductive. It promises speed. But local wisdom can’t necessarily be fast-tracked – it grows by responding rather than replicating.

What I’ve been witnessing:

On a medium-sized, low-input, high-value specialty coffee farm in Ecuador, we tried to save a large section of trees overtaken by moss. A biological spray had failed, so we spent days scraping lichen from branches and clearing debris by hand. It was slow, physical, seasonal work. The kind that doesn’t fit neatly into tight deadlines for grants or investment decks.

The farmer’s priority is high-quality beans grown with little to no chemical intervention, in sync with the surrounding climate. He doesn’t follow a written strategy. He shares learnings and in-field research with the regional university in his spare time, but day-to-day, he works with what the plants need that week. He responds to the weather, the pests, and follows the moon. His approach is rooted in local, adaptive knowledge that evolves with the land.

When we talk about scaling regenerative and circular agricultural practices, I wonder:

Rather than designing models to replicate what works in one place, instead be designing models that ‘scale’ our ability to respond to local conditions to achieve the same or similar outcomes?

3. The Illusion of Collaboration

The uncomfortable challenge:

We talk about “multi-stakeholder collaboration,” but nine times out of ten, the biggest players still hold the pen.

What I’ve been witnessing:

In cacao-producing regions of Ecuador, Nestlé’s reach is everywhere—billboards, packaging, supply chains. I was somewhat surprised to learn that their chocolate doesn’t dominate only export markets like ours in New Zealand, but the majority of the local markets the beans are grown in too.

In the communities I’ve visited where cacao is grown the best beans are fermented traditionally and turned into high-cacao bars by local cooperatives to retain both the flavour of the bean, and the traditional practices required to produce them - if they can. The rest of the beans go straight to Nestlé, unfermented and mass-dried, because:

“They mix it with so much sugar, the flavour doesn’t matter.”

It’s not that Nestlé isn’t investing in producers. It’s that their model still sets the rules. Traditional processes are often sidelined, not scaled. Their name may appear in the sustainability report - but rarely on the bean that was fermented slowly, under a (family) farmer’s watchful eye.

I’ve been wondering:

Is it still collaboration if one player holds the pen, sets the price, and defines what ‘good’ looks like?

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Simply put, my focus and questions for this session has shifted. It’s less about what scaled circular food system innovations promise and more about how we ensure their impact isn’t defined by what they quietly erase in the process.

The wonderings I’m carrying aren’t resolved, and as someone who works best with producers rather than as one, and who balances their time and energy between executive presentationsf and forest trails, they’re uncomfortable to admit. But these tensions sit beneath so many “solutions” we want to see widely practiced. So, are these the questions you’d take to the session too? Or would you evolve them further in some way? Share with others and let me know