Maria Raciti

THE DESIGN FLAW AT THE HEART OF SOCIAL CHANGE

Maria Raciti, Janine Gertz and Sam Raciti

There is a design flaw at the heart of social change. In our editorial, we name it, explain it and show what can be done about it.

The flaw

Most social marketing programs are typically funded for one to three years. Meaningful behaviour change usually takes longer. People need time to notice a problem, try something different and keep doing it. Programs need time to understand participants, work with partners and learn from results.

When funding horizons are shorter than change horizons, three predictable distortions follow.

• Output capture. Highly visible deliverables such as workshops run, people reached and resources distributed become funder-encouraged proxies or signals for behaviour change.
• Outcome drift. Program goals quietly shift toward what can be funded and measured within the contract period.
• Performative evaluation. Measures of success begin to drift towards that needed to secure the next round of funding.

Each of these follows logically from the incentives built into short-term social change funding. The system with an increasing focus on communicating impact rewards visible activity over durable change, and we adapt accordingly.

Projectification: complex change, sliced thin

There is a name for the bigger pattern too. Projectification means turning long-term social change into a string of short projects, each with its own deadline, milestones and reporting cycle. It makes the work easier to manage on paper, but harder to sustain in practice. Staff contracts end just as relationships mature. Audience insight leaves with departing teams. Communities are asked to start again with a new project name and a fresh set of promises.

For social marketing, this matters because participant trust, insight and partnership are part of how successful change happens. When funding stops and starts, those critical mechanisms are weakened.

Elections move the goalposts

Government funding adds a second layer of volatility. When governments change, policy language and priorities change with them. A program can remain vital to the people it serves yet no longer fit the new funding framework. Organisations then spend scarce time reframing their work for the next round. This dynamic plays out in every country where social programs depend on public funds.

What better looks like

Better funding would be designed around change horizons, not just budget and election cycles. That means longer commitments where the problem demands them, staged learning milestones instead of premature outcome claims. It also means funding the infrastructure of authentic impact, such as relationships, local capability building and evaluation that helps programs improve while they are still running.

In such instances, accountability matches how change actually occurs. Sharper measurement and better theories of change matter, but they cannot compensate for funding structures that keep pulling programs back to the start.

Feels familiar? Read more

If this feels familiar, the editorial gives language to a problem many people in social marketing, policy and community work already recognise. It synthesises learnings from collaborative governance, resource dependence, distributive politics and nonprofit resilience scholarship and practice.

The editorial is open access: Raciti, M., Gertz, J. and Raciti, S. (2026), "Navigating short-term funding and government election cycles to achieve sustainable, transformative social impact", Journal of Social Impact in Business Research, Vol. 2 No. 4, pp. 73-82. https://doi.org/10.1108/JSIBR-03-2026-0004

Indigenous peoples’ worldviews permeate the businesses they run, providing them with a unique competitive advantage to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) for success. Indigenous worldviews encompass understandings of complex, dynamic relationships. Such understandings position Indigenous businesses to better optimize economic sovereignty, well-being, and prosperity than mainstream businesses. AI-mediated marketing systems shape how businesses are recognized, ranked, and integrated into digital market streams. Indigenous worldviews understand the world as a complex constellation of relationships encompassing human and more-than-human kin that form an indivisible, perpetually fluxing relational ecosystem. As such, Indigenous worldviews provide Indigenous businesses with innate “relational fluency” with sophisticated understandings for engaging with AI as non-human kin within marketing systems. Anchored in the sister concepts of Indigenous survivance (an ongoing, self-determined Indigenous presence) and thrivance (flourishing grounded in Indigenous lifeways), this chapter presents the Indigenous Business Algorithmic Futures (IBAF) conceptual framework and a “blakprint” guiding its operationalization. The IBAF describes how Indigenous relational fluency interacts with algorithmic infrastructures through three intertwined dimensions. First, algorithmic recognition captures how AI systems detect and interpret Indigenous business identities; second, algorithmic mediation highlights how AI systems govern provenance and credibility signals; and third, algorithmic sovereignty concerns the governance frameworks for Indigenous custodianship of Indigenous data, cultural and intellectual property. Overall, Indigenous businesses are uniquely advantaged by their relational fluency, which positions them for success in marketing ecosystems increasingly characterized by non-human intelligence.

Purpose
The purpose of this study is to introduce a special issue that surfaces the under-documented structural flaw at the heart of social impact work, exposing how short-term funding horizons and government election cycles influence the achievement of sustainable, transformative social impact.

Design/methodology/approach
A conceptual synthesis is offered, integrating insights from collaborative governance, resource dependence theory, distributive politics, nonprofit resilience and projectification scholarship. Inspired by an Australian Indigenous community-controlled organisation’s experiences, this special issue foregrounds the conditions that hinder durable social impact.

Findings
Short-term funding and government election cycles create structural distortions, including output capture, outcome drift, performative evaluation, relational erosion, workforce churn and the projectification of complex social change into siloed, piecemeal activities. These dynamics erode the conditions necessary for sustainable, transformative social change. This editorial synthesises the literature and locates the special issue contributions. This study also presents an Indigenous Knowledge System-informed special issue design that is practitioner-driven and Indigenous-led with a whole-circle practice-research-practice feedback loop that exemplifies how social impact learnings can be mobilised.

Practical implications
Social change scholars and practitioners will find an evidence base to advocate for structural reforms. Many readers may also find this editorial affirming, as it makes visible the shared lived experiences of funding and election cycle volatility, calling out the associated hidden labour and disrupted social impact trajectories.

Originality/value
This special issue shows how short-term funding and election cycles operate as structural headwinds that shape social impact programs capacity to achieve sustainable transformation. This study also models and encourages social impact whole-circle practice-research-practice feedback loops.

This paper assembles key Indigenous concepts and culturally adapts them into resources for use by mainstream services to support all customers experiencing vulnerability. Using Bartlet et al.’s (2012) Two-Eyed Seeing approach, eight influential Indigenous concepts were chosen for their capacity to extend existing service thinking beyond Western assumptions, being: cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005), radical hope (Lear, 2006), survivance (Vizenor, 1999), thrivance (Baumann, 2023), relationality (Moreton-Robinson, 2017), storying (Phillips & Bunda, 2018), Dadirri (Ungunmerr-Baumann, 2022) and Indigenous self-determination (Rademaker & Rowse, 2020). Drawing on the author’s lived experience as an Indigenous marketing scholar, eight principles, a micro-meso-macro framework, and a reflective questioning tool were developed to assist service marketers. As Indigenous knowledges are inherently strengths-based and holistic, these resources apply across all forms of customer vulnerability and service ecologies. A positionality-informed protocol guides appropriate use across Indigenous and non-Indigenous service contexts. These Indigenous-informed resources provide the opportunity to enrich service ecologies.

Social marketing has carefully built an extensive, credible evidence base for influencing behaviour in ways that benefit individuals, communities and the broader public good. As the discipline has matured, so too has its ambition, extending from a heavy focus on downstream individual behaviour change towards systems-level thinking and structural reform. However, one dimension of the discipline’s maturity remains underdeveloped. Although the need to centre Indigenous peoples’ knowledges, perspectives and experiences in social marketing is widely recognised, social marketing scholarship has not kept pace.

Recently, there has been growing interest among the global marketing research community to create space for Indigenous knowledges and perspectives. This article introduces EveryWhen, positioning it as both an Australian Indigenous knowledge system that offers a nonlinear perception of time and a methodology with wide-ranging applications in marketing research. Time is culturally constructed, and for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’, EveryWhen represents time as the infinite present—unmeasured, indivisible, and elastic, where the past, present, and future co-exist. Through a case study with Australian Indigenous doctoral student consumers, this article demonstrates how the multisensory EveryWhen methodology utilises Australian Indigenous storytelling/yarning, three-dimensional earth-drawn artefact creation, and an adaptation of Bishop and Tynan’s (2025) Kin and Country five-perspective analytical lens to capture nonlinear consumer temporalities. Conducted by and with Indigenous Australians and adhering to Indigenous research design principles, the case study also models best practice in Indigenous research. The EveryWhen findings revealed layered, dynamic consumer journeys, showing how new marketing research insights emerge when temporality is foregrounded. EveryWhen is portable across a range of contexts and applicable to all consumers, representing a pathway to decolonisation and Indigenising marketing research. For marketing researchers, the value of EveryWhen lies not only in introducing nonlinear temporalities but also in extending multisensory methodologies to broaden the ways consumer journeys are accessed, captured, and represented in marketing research.

In the twenty-first century, doctoral education has been captured within a performance culture that emphasizes timely thesis progression and completions over the importance of researcher identity (re)formation and intellectual growth (Manathunga, 2019). Under the conditions of ‘cybernetic capitalism’ (Peters, 2015), the doctorate has been reconceptualized as a neoliberal exercise in efficient project management where supervisors and candidates work through a linear process towards the production of theses (Zembylas, 2023). Instead, the experience of studying for a doctorate and supervising candidates is often a complex pedagogical activity, where research does not necessarily progress unproblematically and life events often intervene to impede steady progress. The huge gap in the ways doctoral education is represented and understood in policy documents and guidelines and the realities many candidates and supervisors experience often provokes unnecessary anxiety and stress for all (Mura & Wijesinghe, 2022). Rather than minimalizing the complexity of doctoral supervision, we argue it is imperative that policy makers, university leadership, supervisors and candidates be encouraged to grapple honestly with the inherent supervision complexities....

Although previous research has found social class differences in students’ academic performance at university, success in higher education is far more multi-faceted. This study surveyed 2,665 undergraduate students from six Australian universities to investigate mediators of class differences in success, where success was operationalised using diverse and comprehensive measures (e.g., academic self-efficacy, cognitive engagement). Importantly, class was operationalised as a continuous variable rather than arbitrary quartiles. Mediation analyses showed consistent relationships between class and sense of success. Economic capital was identified as the main mediator, followed by social connections, cultural expectations, and aspirations. Some criteria—particularly greater interdependent motivation to be a role model for their community and assist their families after university—were more important in success evaluations for students from backgrounds with lower measures of socioeconomic class. Interdependent motivations suppressed some of the negative effects of lower class, providing evidence of alternative capitals or personal motivational resources. We conclude that conceptions of educational success that elide non-academic forms of success and minimise student’s motivations, especially community-based motivations, offer a limited and limiting understanding of the student experience.

Doctoral education is a key site of knowledge creation that has the potential to either foreclose or open up possibilities for transformation in higher education. It is a pedagogical space rife with neoliberal imaginaries that ground strong affective investments in efficiency and strict regimes of accountability. The flexible knowledge worker, the entrepreneur and the industry-ready graduate comprise some key examples of governing significations in doctoral education that contribute to affective ecologies of anxiety, fear, shame and anger among both doctoral candidates and supervisors. These affective experiences are particularly heightened for First Nations and transcultural (migrant, refugee, culturally and linguistically diverse and international) doctoral candidates, whose ways of knowing and being in the academy are governed by imaginaries and affective investments that run up against dominant arrangements. This paper seeks to challenge dominant imaginaries by foregrounding First Nations Storying. This First Nations knowledge approach has the potential to produce ecologies of affect characterized by connectedness, reciprocity and solidarity. There are, however, a number of governing imaginaries, especially in settler-invader countries like Australia, which make embedding these localised and embodied affective ecologies very challenging. This paper explores both the opportunities and obstacles that exist in attempts to introduce alternative affective ecologies in doctoral education.

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