METHOD PAPER · 07 SECTIONS
This rubric is versioned. Changes produce a new version with a dated changelog entry; superseded versions remain readable at their permalink. Records state which rubric version graded them.
The rubric exists to be cited. A council paper or grant application should be able to reference "change4planet.org Transferability Grade, v1.0" and have the reader verify exactly what that means.
Two grades, assessed independently, never blended. Transferability (T1 to T5): how portable is this intervention to another place? Evidence (E1 to E4): how good is the measurement behind the claimed outcome? A record can be highly portable and poorly evidenced (T1/E4), or site-locked and superbly evidenced (T5/E1). Both facts matter separately, so they are never combined into a single score.
Six axes, each scored 0, 1 or 2. Higher total means more portable.
| AXIS | 2 | 1 | 0 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Capital intensity | Within routine municipal budget | Needs a capital program | Needs national or major donor funding |
| Governance dependency | Existing powers suffice | Needs policy change | Needs new legislation or unusual authority |
| Environmental specificity | Broadly applicable | Constrained by climate or geography | Highly site-specific |
| Skills and maintenance | Existing staff can operate | Needs training or a specialist | Needs ongoing external expertise |
| Funding repeatability | Recurrent, self-funding, or budgeted | Repeatable grant | One-off or philanthropic |
| Political durability | Survived a change of administration | Untested through transition | Ended at transition |
| GRADE | TOTAL | MEANING |
|---|---|---|
| T1 | 10 to 12 | Widely transferable |
| T2 | 8 to 9 | Transferable with modest preconditions |
| T3 | 5 to 7 | Transferable to similar contexts only |
| T4 | 3 to 4 | Substantially constrained |
| T5 | 0 to 2 | Effectively site-specific |
| GRADE | STANDARD |
|---|---|
| E1 | Independent measurement, peer-reviewed or audited, with baseline and control or counterfactual |
| E2 | Independent measurement with baseline, no control |
| E3 | Operator-reported measurement, underlying data published |
| E4 | Operator claim only, no underlying data available |
Each axis score carries a one-line rationale on the record page. No unexplained scores.
Score what happened, not what was promised. A program that has not yet crossed a change of administration scores 1 on political durability, never 2.
Axis scores are assessed against the operator's own context at deployment time. The reader maps them onto their own context; the per-axis rationale is what makes that mapping possible.
E1: independent measurement, peer-reviewed or audited, with baseline and control or counterfactual. E2: independent measurement with baseline, no control. E3: operator-reported measurement, underlying data published. E4: operator claim only, no underlying data available.
No record is published at any grade without at least one primary source.
The grade attaches to the record's headline outcomes. Where individual outcomes differ in quality, the record grade is the grade of the weakest headline outcome, and the outcomes table flags each measurement's independence individually.
Absence of measurement is a finding, not a gap: a deployed intervention whose outcome was never assessed is recorded with status unmeasured and the source establishing that absence is cited.
| STATUS | MEANING |
|---|---|
| operating | Running and delivering measured results |
| completed | Finite project, delivered, outcome measured |
| degraded | Delivered, results declining or partially reversed |
| failed_technical | Did not achieve the intended outcome |
| failed_social | Technically functional, rejected or unused by the community it served |
| discontinued_political | Worked, ended by funding withdrawal or political change |
| unmeasured | Deployed, outcome never assessed. Itself a finding. |
Status is a statement about the world, not about the record. It moves when the world moves, via re-verification, and every status change is dated and listed on the record.
Records with a failed_ or discontinued_ status carry a mandatory failure analysis. The operator is offered right of reply before the record is promoted or distributed, any response received is published in full alongside, and every such record states its right-of-reply status in its record block.
1. Assemble sources. At least one primary source or the record does not publish.
2. Score the six transferability axes with one-line rationales, sum, assign T grade.
3. Grade the evidence against the evidence table, looking only at measurement quality, never at outcome direction. A well-measured failure grades E1.
4. Assign outcome status from the most recent verifiable state of the intervention.
5. Record assessed-on dates and the rubric version.
6. On annual re-verification, re-run steps 2 to 5. Political durability and outcome status are the axes most likely to move.
| Version | Date | Change |
|---|---|---|
| 1.0 | 2026-08-07 | Initial rubric. |
Rubric v1.0 · 2026-08-07 · changes produce a new version at a permalink
change4planet is a working record of environmental interventions that have actually been deployed: what they cost, what they achieved, what went wrong, and where else they could work.
Records are working documents. Check the verification date before citing.
© CHANGE4PLANET · records reusable with attribution and ref number