Dear Sustainability,
Today June Holley posted a tweet that set off an avalanche: Sustainability v Resilience? The tweet sent me to a Foreign Policy article by Jamais Casico (you can download a PDF of article or just read a summary).
Oh, Sustainability, I love you so. But you trouble me. I can never pin you down. I see you re-inventing yourself for each of your new admirers, trying to please everyone. You tell one admirer that you’re going to hook him up nice with a whole range of donors, so if one flakes there will still be others to make sure his project has the money to keep going. You tell another that you’ll secure the ongoing support of people in her community. And yet another that you’ll set him up with a phat business that will cross-subsidize his best projects. Then you really mess me up: I see you hanging out with those green folks, talking shit about how you’re going to save the planet. You say you’re gonna meet my needs AND everyone else’s too, right on into the future. I hope you deliver. But, I gotta tell you, I’m skeptical.
I have to break it to you. There’s someone else: Resilience. And, boy, is she hot. I noticed her about four years ago, working on a USAID project. She was there, in the background, in the shadow of Fragility. She had a great attitude. I knew right away she was special. Important. So I started following her and have been quietly stalking her ever since. My friends have been helping me — sending me little updates when they see her around. She’s practical, this Resilience. Really focuses on getting things done.
Dr Ami Carpenter gave me my first good look at her in 2006, describing her in a paper called Patterns of Resilience in Fragile States. There, I learned that she had a dark side:
…resilience is not itself a ‘good’ quality — after all, corruption is a very resilient institution. Likewise, the resilience of particular regimes (Stalin’s, for example) does not correlate with the characteristics required for development to move forward.
Resilience is simply a property of systems, based on particular features of those systems. …We cannot assume inherent goodness in either the case of resilience or the related term “adaptive capacity” which refers to coping, nor should we assume that resilience is some sort of panacea for vulnerability.
Despite this, she has lots of friends. Whoah, it’s getting late, Sustainability. I’ll tell you more about Resilience later. Bear with me. I think you’ll like her. Maybe we can all be friends.
Sustainability is a big tease, a sort of enfant terrible for those development folks who need an elusive goal to justify feeding the monster year after year with new projects and more money and staying on task. Without the hope of finding sustainability, they would have thrown in the towel in lots of places (we can’t really name them, to protect the folks who are still there..but they know who we mean). In the name of achieving sustainability, I have seen lots of bad ideas get funded, mainly because they are sexy and fun and new. (Remember endowments for NGO’s in countries that were being graduated by USAID?) Most of them went to poorly-run, pet projects, with little prospects of succeeding. But they had the sustainability badge on the lapel.
Resiliency sounds like a more serious date (one who won’t run after you pay for dessert), but you wonder if she will make you feel the same way if you are interested in “development’ and see yourself and your programs as being the causal link to achieving MDGs or IRs, or whatever is at the end of the logframe. When I look up the word, Webster offers up elasticity, and ability to withstand shock and to retain its natural strengths or shape. These definitions conjure up visions of countries returning to their natural states of equilibrium and proper functioning after some external or internal shocks (like Vietnam or El Salvador) — so the term is a propos for the D&G crowd concerned with promoting stability and averting fragile states, but less so for the run-of-the-mill development types, who still worry about economic growth, poverty reduction, and improving those pesky indicators. How do you get credit for achieving development if the place already had all the right stuff to begin with, and just needed some breathing room and less external meddling?
The task for making resiliency an equally fun date is to figure out how to get the right institutions to work, and people trained,and ministries staffed up, and salaries paid, and for the private sector to function without all the red tape, but still giving people a decent wage, so that the system gains traction, and goes back to its “innate state” of producing jobs, increasing incomes and prosperity. That’s not easy and it’s not the sexy new date being offered up by sustainability, which is the quick fix, 5-year program, drop in consultants, and co-opting a few locals and calling it “institution building”.
If you need any more reasons to have a cold hard look at sustainability, have a look at this. I think sustainability (probably through no fault of its own) is a word of easy virtue.