Unpacking incentives and capacities: factors affecting actor behaviour change

To achieve Market Systems Development (MSD) practitioners are encouraged to analyse the incentives and capacities of different market players.

Analysing stakeholder incentives and capacities enables programmes to:

• understand why the system currently operates as it does
• develop a realistic vision for change that will be sustainable and spread to scale
• identify specific partners who could have the incentives and capacity to stimulate that change
• decide what kind of support to offer those partners to catalyse behaviour change

This paper breaks down incentives and capacities and presents a tool – Actor Behaviour Change (ABC) Factors – which links actors’ resources and priorities to the characteristics of a behaviour change that the programme wants to stimulate, and which can be applied to any actor (partners, intermediaries or beneficiaries).

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