A new regulation, one clever piece of technology, or an awareness campaign can each nudge behaviour in the right direction — but on their own, they rarely add up to lasting, systemic change. DAISY’s research into more than 50 real-world cases confirms what many practitioners already suspect: transformation happens when interventions work together, not in isolation.
The problem with single-shot solutions
Biodiversity loss is driven by a tangle of social, economic, political and behavioural factors. Despite this complexity, interventions are still too often designed and evaluated one at a time: a subsidy here, a certification scheme there, a public information drive somewhere else. Each may look promising on its own, but without coordination they can just as easily cancel each other out, or fail to reach the scale needed to shift an entire system.
DAISY’s research reframes the question project designers should be asking. Instead of “which intervention will work?”, the more useful question is “which combination of interventions, for which context, and involving which actors, actually holds together?”
Introducing the Transformative Intervention Mixes (TIMs) framework
To help answer that question, DAISY developed the Transformative Intervention Mixes (TIMs) framework. Drawing on lessons from real initiatives across sectors, TIMs identifies four features shared by the intervention combinations that genuinely drive transformative change:
- Multiple interventions — regulatory, economic, educational, technological and other measures combined, rather than deployed on their own.
- Multiple actors — governments, businesses, researchers, civil society and the public each carrying part of the change.
- Multiple scales — local, regional, national and international action reinforcing, rather than undercutting, one another.
- Multiple dimensions — behavioural, social, economic, technological and governance factors addressed together rather than in separate silos.
Successful mixes typically combine complementary types of action — regulation, economic incentives, knowledge and education, social norms, emotions and values, technology, choice architecture, and biophysical or material resources — rather than relying on any single lever.
From theory to a living catalogue of 50+ cases
The framework is paired with a living catalogue of more than 50 documented cases, spanning agri-food, energy, education, urban and regional development, biodiversity monitoring and conservation, health and wellbeing, and technology. Each case is broken down into:
- the intervention mix that was applied
- the barriers and enabling conditions the initiative encountered
- the transformative mechanisms at work
- the opportunities for scaling the approach further
This isn’t a static archive — it’s designed to be used. Researchers, policymakers and practitioners can filter cases by domain on the Care-full Transformation Platform and find examples close to their own context, then read the full framework behind them.
Why it matters
There is no single lever that solves biodiversity loss. What DAISY’s research shows, case after case, is that transformative change requires carefully designed combinations of interventions that reinforce each other while staying grounded in local context, the actors involved, and the values at stake. By pairing a conceptual framework with a growing body of real-world evidence, DAISY offers something practical: a way to design for combinations, not just components — and to learn from what has already been tried before starting from scratch.
Explore the catalogue on the Care-full Transformation Platform, or read the full TIMs framework report for the research behind it.
