Greening Aid: Sustainable, Or Not So Much

Running a series this week by Brooks Keene looking at the intersection between aid and the environment, focusing on whether aid interventions are truly sustainable.  Brooks previously worked as a development policy consultant in Kenya, and now works for a US-based NGO.

Sustainable, Or Not So Much

I’ve been increasingly thinking that aid organizations (here I mean both humanitarian and development organizations) have a very uneasy relationship with the concept of sustainability. We throw the word around everywhere. It’s almost become a necessary placeholder in grant proposals as in, “The project will provide sustainable access to safe drinking water for 200 households.”

By this, if they even think about it, aid agencies often mean that what they are doing will continue after they leave. And yet, there’s a slow and painful transformation taking place as humanitarian agencies begin to grasp the foundational meanings of the word.

At its root, all human activity exists at the pleasure of the natural environment. The bare equation of survival goes something like this: sunlight + water + air + fertile topsoil = life. Of course, if you throw in shelter, air conditioning, a car, hot showers, access to anti-retro viral drugs, Guitar Hero (Metallica edition) and a shovel, then the perks go up from there.

Unfortunately, the list of ingredients gets more complicated as well, including things like silicon, fossil fuels or iron ore and most of the time some things from that original list as well.

All is well and good with the ever-expanding list until your list starts colliding with that first equation. Those foundational ingredients literally pass in and out of our body, and our health and survival is their health and survival. These ingredients need to remain “sustainable.   It is when used in this context that the word is its most powerful.

You all know the mid-point of the environmental story. We messed up. Our extra “needs” and wants have and are seriously messing with that basic equation. Just look at the sanitation system in the developed world. Other than for a few enlightened souls in Sweden, we have flush toilets that combine our urine and feces with copious amounts of water, wasting both organic fertilizer and perfectly good water. We just messed with no less than two elements of our foundational equation.

And so, environmental groups arose. Aid organizations traditionally had little to do with them. They were in the business of saving lives or at least trying to get people a little bit closer to “developed” standards of living (Everyone needs Guitar Hero! Okay, maybe more fair to say that everyone needs a home or clean water).

For their part, environmental organizations tended to focus on sustenance of the natural world and not on the human survival link. Often this translated as preservation of “nature” by which was presumably meant things not human. Nature was then set up in competition with human life. Our equation exposes this as a basic fallacy.

[Photo of a project supported by the Sustainable Development Fund in Hong Kong]