Developing practice
The Adoption Bridge
Sustainability interventions often depend on people or organisations doing something differently. But introducing a solution does not automatically create the behaviour or participation through which that solution is expected to work.
The Adoption Bridge is a practitioner-oriented framework I am developing to make that implementation space more explicit — and to help diagnose where attention may actually be needed before deciding what to change.
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What the bridge is examining
The framework begins by asking what an intervention actually requires people or organisations to do. It then examines the behavioural conditions surrounding that requirement, what happens in practice, and whether the resulting participation is sufficient for the intervention mechanism to function.
Importantly, the bridge ends at required participation — not at impact. Participation may be necessary for an intervention to work, but it does not guarantee the intended sustainability outcome.
The diagnostic process is also designed to exit behavioural analysis when the evidence points elsewhere. The constraint may instead be technical, structural, systemic, regulatory, financial or domain-specific.
“Evidence before explanation.”
Current status
The Adoption Bridge is a practitioner-oriented framework under development and critical review. It draws on established behavioural science, including COM-B, as part of a broader implementation diagnosis. It is not presented as a new behavioural theory or as an empirically validated framework.
Where is your implementation getting stuck?
The framework is not designed to tell every organisation what intervention to use. It is designed to help ask a better question first: where, exactly, is implementation breaking down?
The answer may be behavioural. It may sit elsewhere.