What happens when your intervention is over? When you stop training the doctors, providing the bags of food, or advising the Ministry of Finance? Will anything remain? If something will remain, your project is sustainable. That quality – being designed to continue once the outsider effort ends – is sustainability.
I hate this word because the grammar makes no sense.
I also hate this word because it means so many things to so many different people. The definition I just gave you was the one that I learned from a former boss, the smartest woman in the world. (Seriously, she is. If you had ever met her, you’d agree with me.) Sheila taught me that sustainability isn’t about your project continuing, or even the institution you support or develop. Sustainability is about the change you help bring about being a lasting change. It doesn’t matter if your child health center closes if children continue to get improved medical care.
Other people think other things. Some people think sustainability is about building organizations and institutions that last. A lot of projects think that sustainability is about having a steady supply of new donors; a project is sustainable if it will be able to find a new donor once you stop funding it. MSF, of course, thinks sustainability is irrelevant.
So, I guess I hate the word sustainability because it has no agreed upon-meaning, and it’s a prime example of the kind of jargon that keeps planners from thinking about the details of what they want to do.
Edited to add: Jeff Trexler reminds me that I left out an entire set of meanings for the word sustainable. One of its most common usages is as part of the phrase “sustainable development.” Sustainable development refers to development which occurs without damage to the environment, culturally appropriate, and continues on its own once begun (according some combination of the criteria I defined above).
Edited again: Owen Barder has his own take on what’s wrong with sustainability.
Yep, sustainability is one of those buzz words that people use in every and all situations. But I would have to agree, the central tenant behind it – whatever its actual definition – is what your former boss said: “being designed to continue once the outsider effort ends.”
I’m not opposed to programs that lead to lasting change! Sustainable development is a very good thing. I’m just opposed to the buzzword.
When I ran devt projects in Northern Afghanistan in the late 90’s we tried to think of sustainable as ‘what was still running, managed by the community (though not necessarily funded by them – they may have got someone else to pay for it), 3-5 or so years after our interventions finished’. So if they nominated child health, and together we had done work on that, and (as was the case), three years after we’d finished and left that community, the only thing still running was child vaccination – well, evidently, something about that aspect of the project was considered valuable enough to by sustained. Sustainability and value are intertwined. That which is not valued will rarely be sustained (unless you have done a good job of brainwashing the community).
Phil – I’d never heard it put into terms of community value before. That’s a really great way to think about it. I think it’s my new personal definition.
The whole issue is complex and difficult. Some things are clearly ‘good’, even though not valued by a community, and so such things so not endure.Family planning, girls education, women’s economic rights, minority rights, environmentally sound practices, etc, etc were often completely unvalued, and so efforts to embed such things did not endure – yet these are highly valuable, and I would argue, universally so. To enforce them smacks of humanitarian imperialism (and is bound to fail); but to successfully embed them takes years – so you end up working for 5 or 10 years or more in one little village, while around you hundreds of other villages are crying out for basic development….
One of the reasons I tend not to use the word–except ironically, as a way of tweaking more serious use–is that a primary function is to connect with a particular network. It’s like a secret handshake, inside joke or rickrolling.
Such semantic markers can be fine in themselves, but with sustainability there’s the pretense of something substantive. Yet all too often, to say that one’s charity is sustainable means about as much as saying it’s mvfpgadfuqemnatic, except sustainable sounds a helluva lot more impressive.
Here’s an exercise I’ve found useful. Sustainability, social entrepreneur, venture philanthropist–whatever the word of the month, I try to ask myself what words I’d be using as descriptors, say, fifty years ago. If the words aren’t the same, think about the assumptions expressed in each. Then I ask myself if I think the words today are likely to be used in the future + how they might change.
On the one hand this keeps me from getting swept up in buzzwords, but it also means I spend a lot of time mumbling incoherently!
Trying to break down the gatekeeping function of jargon and buzzwords has become a primary goal of this blog for me.
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