Summary
The three levels of system change is a model of how a large system, such as a food system, gives way to a new one. It comes from the ‘multilevel perspective’ of Frank Geels, of the University of Manchester, as retold in the System Innovation Initiative’s paper ‘Building Better Systems’.
At the micro level are niches, where people try new practices and technologies. At the macro level is the wider setting of values, ideologies, demographics and economic conditions. Between them sits the ‘regime’: the institutions, markets and rules that give a system its structure. Change needs all three, the paper argues: “without a new regime there is no new system”.
Rationale
Part 2’s footnote links this paper as an example of ‘micro, meso, macro’, one of the models behind its circles of ‘Self’, ‘Community’, ‘Society’. We took the three levels, not Geels’s theory of how systems change.
Source: systeminnovation.org