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Rethinking Development Practice in a Complex World
Development today is being tested by unprecedented challenges—climate volatility, economic shocks, shifting geopolitical landscapes, and technological disruption. Traditional models, built on centralized governance and rigid program structures, are proving too slow, too fragile, and too dependent on stability.
To meet these challenges, development must evolve. It must be more adaptive, more decentralized, and more regenerative. This is the premise of a thought experiment by GrowZA’s think tank, which explores an alternative development framework inspired by natural systems.
Drawing from the Tsunza Mangrove Forest in Kenya, this model examines how development can function like a mangrove ecosystem—thriving in uncertainty, sustaining impact over time, and enabling systems that grow stronger through interconnection rather than hierarchy.
This type of sector-wide thinking, rooted in lessons from both nature and development practice, is what is required to move beyond outdated paradigms and build a more resilient global development architecture.
Lessons from Tsunza: Why Mangroves Offer a New Development Lens
The Tsunza Peninsula, located in Kenya’s coastal Kwale County, is home to a mature and ecologically vital mangrove system. These mangroves safeguard biodiversity, protect coastlines from erosion and storm surges, and filter nutrients essential for sustaining local marine ecosystems.
Three key lessons from the Tsunza mangrove ecosystem inform this framework:
Interconnected Growth – Mangrove root systems interlock, strengthening the ecosystem by distributing stability across a network rather than concentrating it in a single structure.
Shock Absorption – Mangroves are designed for volatility, with flexible root systems that withstand rising sea levels, storm surges, and saltwater intrusion.
Regenerative Design – Unlike extractive models, mangrove forests renew themselves naturally, ensuring sustainability without requiring continuous external intervention.
These principles—networked resilience, adaptive capacity, and regenerative impact—form the foundation of the Mangrove Model for Development.
The Mangrove Model: A Five-Pillar Development Framework
1. Rhizomatic Growth: Building Multi-Nodal Networks
Current Challenge: Development efforts often centralize decision-making and funding, creating bottlenecks that limit scale and responsiveness.
The Mangrove Approach: Development must be structured as a multi-nodal system, where impact flows through a decentralized network of implementers, funders, and local actors rather than through a single centralized authority.
Key Actions:
Regional development hubs that connect multiple actors rather than relying on singular institutional oversight.
Peer-to-peer knowledge sharing that enables localized expertise to shape interventions rather than top-down prescriptive models.
Interoperability across sectors, ensuring that public, private, and civil society actors collaborate without rigid institutional boundaries.
This approach ensures that no single point of failure can disrupt progress, and that localized capacity is strengthened rather than bypassed.
2. Shock-Resilient Design: Structuring for Uncertainty
Current Challenge: Development programs assume stability—but economic, climate, and political shocks frequently derail projects.
The Mangrove Approach: Development must anticipate volatility, designing governance, financing, and implementation mechanisms that absorb shocks rather than break under pressure.
Key Actions:
Diversified financial structures to reduce reliance on single-source funding, blending grant capital, impact investment, and locally generated revenue streams.
Distributed governance models that allow decision-making to shift dynamically based on real-time conditions.
Redundant execution pathways, ensuring that if one initiative or partner fails, others can continue delivering impact.
Like Tsunza’s mangroves, development systems must be built to flex, adapt, and withstand turbulence without collapsing.
3. Smart Filtration: Enabling Access Without Bureaucratic Bottlenecks
Current Challenge: Many development programs create administrative barriers that slow implementation, favoring compliance over impact.
The Mangrove Approach: Rather than rigid eligibility criteria and extensive bureaucratic processes, development must act as a filter—enabling high-impact interventions to scale while ensuring accountability.
Key Actions:
Trust-based funding mechanisms that prioritize strong governance and clear impact metrics over excessive paperwork.
Real-time performance tracking, shifting from static annual reporting cycles to continuous data-driven decision-making.
Tiered engagement models, where small organizations can gradually scale up involvement based on demonstrated impact rather than being locked out of funding opportunities.
A well-functioning development model does not block access—it streamlines it, ensuring that resources flow to where they are needed most, without excessive friction.
4. Regenerative Impact: Ensuring Development Outlasts Its Funders
Current Challenge: Many interventions are funding-dependent and do not transition into self-sustaining systems.
The Mangrove Approach: Development must be designed to regenerate impact, ensuring that local actors can sustain, expand, and evolve initiatives without long-term external dependency.
Key Actions:
Built-in economic sustainability models, such as revenue-generating services, social enterprise models, and circular economy principles.
Transfer of ownership strategies, where external development partners exit within a defined timeframe, ensuring full local control.
Institutionalization of local leadership, ensuring that development knowledge is embedded in communities rather than remaining external.
Sustainable development should not require continuous external input—it should create conditions where impact is self-reinforcing and scalable.
5. Adaptive Governance: Thriving in Change, Not Resisting It
Current Challenge: Most development models struggle to pivot when conditions change, leading to inefficiencies and program failures.
The Mangrove Approach: Governance structures should be designed for adaptability, ensuring that programs remain relevant, responsive, and continuously improving.
Key Actions:
Scenario-based strategy planning, ensuring that development efforts are built for multiple potential futures rather than a single assumed trajectory.
Agile funding mechanisms, allowing projects to pivot and reallocate resources as conditions shift.
Continuous learning and iteration, with built-in mechanisms for fast-cycle evaluation and strategy refinement.
The future of development will not be static—it will be dynamic, responsive, and built to evolve.
From Development Slur to Essential Enabler: The Evolution of the Intermediary
For years, the term "intermediary" was all but a development slur—a label used to dismiss actors perceived as unnecessary barriers between funders and frontline implementers. The middleman critique was pervasive, often carrying an implicit assumption: that development should function as a direct pipeline from capital to impact, without the need for structured facilitation.
This critique, however, was poorly understood and shortsighted. Those who resisted the role of intermediaries failed to see where the sector was going. They overlooked a fundamental shift: as development challenges became more complex, the need for enabling synthesizers—actors who could bridge sectors, structure scalable solutions, and manage risk—became not just useful, but essential.
Why Intermediaries Were Misunderstood
Historically, development intermediaries were viewed with skepticism for three key reasons:
Perceived Inefficiency – Many saw intermediaries as layers of bureaucracy that diverted resources away from direct service delivery.
Power and Access Concerns – Some believed intermediaries controlled funding flows without adding real value, turning into gatekeepers rather than facilitators.
Rigid Legacy Models – Early intermediaries often mirrored donor-centric compliance structures rather than adaptive, impact-driven ecosystems.
While these criticisms were not entirely unfounded, they missed a critical point: intermediaries were failing not because the role was unnecessary, but because they were operating under outdated models.
A Changing Development Landscape: Why the Need for Intermediaries Became Inevitable
The dismissal of intermediaries made sense in an era of simpler development challenges, where impact could be tracked in straightforward metrics and interventions followed predictable pathways. But as development contexts became more volatile, multi-sectoral, and driven by adaptive challenges, it became clear that old models of direct intervention were no longer sufficient.
Key shifts that redefined the role of the intermediary include:
Complex, Multi-Stakeholder Development – Impact today often requires collaboration between governments, businesses, civil society, and local communities, making structured facilitation indispensable.
Agility and Adaptation Over Rigid Programming – Development interventions must now evolve in real-time, requiring intermediaries who can synthesize information, translate between stakeholders, and adjust strategies rapidly.
Risk Absorption and Compliance Navigation – As regulatory environments and funder expectations grow more complex, intermediaries play a crucial role in ensuring that capital moves efficiently while maintaining accountability.
Rather than acting as passive layers, the best intermediaries became impact architects—designing, integrating, and accelerating development ecosystems.
The Intermediary Paradox: From Irrelevance to Indispensability
Ironically, the very critics who once dismissed intermediaries as redundant now find themselves waiting to be chosen by the best of them. In a world where structured access to funding, partnerships, and scalability is increasingly dependent on ecosystem integration, those who dismissed intermediaries now recognize that they must engage with them to remain relevant.
This has created a paradox:
Funders now rely on high-functioning intermediaries to deploy capital effectively—not because they lack the ability to engage directly, but because the complexity of implementation requires structured pathways.
Implementers who once resisted intermediaries now depend on them for access—as intermediaries have become the curators of opportunity, knowledge, and funding alignment.
Intermediaries themselves have evolved—moving beyond static fund-disbursal mechanisms into dynamic enablers of impact.
The sector no longer debates whether intermediaries should exist. The question now is: Who is designing intermediaries to be effective enablers rather than obstacles?
The Mangrove Model: A New Vision for Intermediation
Recognizing this shift, GrowZA developed the Mangrove Model as a response to the intermediary dilemma—a blueprint for intermediaries to function not as barriers, but as regenerative enablers of development ecosystems.
The Mangrove Model repositions the intermediary as a vital part of development architecture, ensuring that impact is scalable, adaptive, and locally owned.
The Future of Development: Designing the Right Kind of Intermediary
The debate over whether intermediaries should exist is over. What remains is the challenge of designing them for optimal impact.
The sector must now move beyond outdated critiques and focus on:
Ensuring intermediaries serve as enablers, not gatekeepers.
Structuring intermediaries to absorb risk and drive adaptation.
Embedding regenerative design to ensure long-term sustainability.
The future of development is networked, adaptive, and ecosystem-driven. The role of the intermediary is no longer up for debate—the only question is who is designing them to serve, rather than control, the development process.
The Mangrove Model is one possible answer.
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