The Nova Institute has been developing and implementing household interventions for several decades and has incorporated several elements into its approach that have enabled it to achieve remarkable success in permanently shifting household practices to embrace the interventions.
A project’s longevity, whether through maintenance plans, ensuring financial viability or partnering with local government authorities, is explicitly planned for. Moreover, the user-centred approach emphasising quality of life (incorporating environmental, economic, and social aspects of development) puts fulfilling fundamental human needs at the core of the development of interventions.
Our intervention development life-cycle includes seven stages:
Scoping | Pre-feasibility | Feasibility | Pilot | Launch | Scale | Maintain or Exit
Most programmes begin with a scoping or preparation stage. Nova uses this time to familiarise the team with the on-the-ground realities of the communities involved. This typically includes local intelligence gathering and a rapid in situ assessment, allowing Nova and the client to collaboratively define the initial shape and focus of the programme.
Nova’s scoping and baseline services are designed to lay a solid foundation for intervention development. This phase identifies how existing practices — such as energy use or waste handling — currently serve households, and where there is a desire for change. It also helps align the objectives of key stakeholders, including communities, government departments, and corporate sponsors. Interventions are more likely to succeed and be sustained when there is a shared understanding of the problem and overlapping goals.
Scoping involves qualitative engagement and early assessment of the local context, including the trade-offs people navigate in their daily lives. Baseline studies then provide the data needed to support design decisions, using a mix of structured surveys, in-use measurements, and open-ended interviews. Together, these methods offer a clear picture of current behaviours, the services people rely on, and the space for meaningful, adoptable alternatives.
During the feasibility stage, we strive for an integration of the insights of experts from outside the community and the insights of people in the community – they understand from daily experience how things work in their context or lifeworld. Such an integration depends on a free and continuous exchange of ideas, in which the end-users in the team must see the possibility of a practice that can become part of their normal way of doing things, a solution that is a possibility for themselves.
There are often a large number of technical solutions available to solve a given problem, but end-user acceptance usually remains a problem. One way to solve this problem is to present a few of these available solutions to a group who is representative of the target community. This group uses these solutions, evaluates them and compares them to each other. This leads to creative interactions from which contextualised solutions often emerges. Such solutions are again implemented and the whole process is iterated. The aim is to ensure that the intervention is technically sound, socially desirable, and practical to implement.
A pilot implementation can be undertaken once a successful design emerges from the feasibility stage. The pilot implementation aims to test the final design’s implementation at its intended scale. During this stage, the logistics and management aspects of the full-scale implementation are refined. A successful pilot establishes a replicable implementation method that will enable large-scale implementation at multiple sites.
In more extensive programmes, a launch implementation phase may be necessary to evaluate further and refine large-scale implementation processes. In other instances, implementation may proceed after the pilot phase. Most programme resources will typically be invested in implementation. It is ideal to source contractors and human resources from local communities where possible.
These final stages focus on expanding reach (scale), ensuring systems are in place to support delivery, and eventually sustaining or exiting the programme in a planned and responsible way (maintain or exit).
Nova’s approach helps ensure that scale is not a rushed leap ahead, but a series of confident, evidence-based steps forward.