The Virtuous Spiral

A Guide to Sustainability for NGOs in International Development

Alan Fowler, Alan Fowler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134190775
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Volkswirtschaftslehre
• Subtopic: Entwicklungsökonomie

'The Virtuous Spiral is without doubt a most welcome addition to the body of knowledge that will continue to be highly valued in the NGO sector.'
Ezra Limiri Mbogori, Director, Mwelekeo wa NGO (MWENGO), Harare

'Fowler demonstrates how development NGOs can engage in a virtuous spiral of performance-based learning that regenerates public trust. This is a timely book, dealing squarely with the confidence crisis faced by many NGOs in the South and North.'
Louk De La Rive Box, Director, European Centre for Development Policy Management, Maastricht

Sustainability is crucial for all institutions involved in international development. This work offers practical guidance on how to achieve it. There are three main kinds of sustainability and a section of the book is devoted to each: making the impact of the organization's work sustainable, ensuring continuity of funding, and making the organization itself sustainable to remain viable. Achieving all three creates a virtuous spiral. The book takes an organizational rather than a technical or impact-based approach to sustainability. It is based on extensive international research and offers many practical examples of sustainability and the difficult trade-offs involved.

Part I

Change that Endures – Sustaining Development Impact

 

‘Sustainability is the shadow side of unsustainable development.’

(Allan Kaplan, CDRA)

Sustainable progress is supposed to be the guiding light and intention of all development endeavours. The paradox is that what is currently termed progress, or development, is causing greater instability and uncertainty allied to a growing certainty that the present path cannot endure ecologically or socially. The clarion call for development to be sustainable can be seen as a response to a contradiction between the intentions and effects of human action.

Within this paradox, NGDO interventions are meant to make a difference in that their achievements are maintained without them. However, the results of an array of assessments of their impact show that sustainability is a major weakness in performance.¹ There is little evidence to suggest that NGDOs are any better at generating enduring change than official aid agencies, where sustainability is estimated to occur in about 15 per cent of interventions.² Part I examines why this is the case for NGDOs and suggests what can be done to improve the situation.

Chapter 1 sets the scene by unpacking the concept of sustainability in relation to the ‘big picture’ of global change and the many ‘little pictures’ of NGDO interventions. The basic argument is that sustainability is a condition of three overlapping systems, but that these systems are unstable. Moreover, NGDOs are minor and highly dependent actors in terms of change. They control a little, they can influence some things but, in the main, they can only appreciate and respond to the actions of others with more power. Consequently, their approach to sustainability should be both integrative and, more importantly, must focus on building the capacity of communities and themselves to continuously adapt. This is the only approach to sustainability that makes sense in unstable, dependent situations. Sustainability is not to be found in new technologies or policies but in the ability to be agile.

Chapter 2 takes this perspective forward in relation to how NGDOs can intervene with communities and policy makers. It describes three components that need to be present and complementary and that define the content. Allied to content is the importance of the process adopted. Significant aspects of an intervention process relate to participation, linking with and embedding into other processes, and the eventual orderly withdrawal. These two aspects are common areas of NGDO weakness. Limitation stems from the inadequacy of projects as a way of thinking and as a development tool, coupled with problems of organisational psychology that create difficulties in moving from community dependency to independence. NGDOs too seldom have a development practice that serves this purpose, which is necessary if people are to be empowered towards the organisation, not just towards others like the government.

A common problem for NGDOs is to know where they are in a process with communities and others. Typically, monitoring and evaluation are the means to find out. However, Chapter 3 stresses that sustainability requires a new way of thinking about indicators. Rather than measuring achievement against a baseline and towards a (project) goal, NGDOs need signs that predict what will happen once the intervention ends. The chapter describes the real life indicators used as proxies for prediction. It also describes how NGDOs use stages and progressive measures to increase the probability of sustained impact.

Chapter 1

What Does Sustainable Development Mean for NGDOs?

‘… in contexts marked by poverty and gross inequalities, the whole notion of sustainability has little meaning.’ (Peter Oakley, INTRAC)³

Bringing about sustainable change is context dependent. The context in question – from local to global – is characterised by forces that create or reinforce instability and unpredictability, economically, socially and environmentally. Two important forces are market capitalism as a wealth-creating system and the search for and assertion of personal and group identity within and across existing political boundaries. This chapter reviews these forces as a way of locating NGDOs in the ‘big and small pictures’ of their operational contexts. It argues that their highly dependent position requires a perspective of sustainable development that, at its core, enhances people’s capacity to cope with instability, not simply reactively, but in a directed way. However, NGDOs face constraints in pursuing this approach, three of which are described.

NGDOs and the ‘Big Picture’

‘UN Report warns of Earth’s unsustainable future’. This headline captioned a newspaper article about GEO-2000, an end of millennium report on the state of the global environment and a remedial programme of action proposed by the United Nation’s Environment Programme (UNEP).⁴ The caption reflects the biggest scale and the most fundamental feature to which the concept of sustainability is being applied. Its perspective is the condition of the natural world in relation to mankind. The report is founded on a systems view of the world. It is a system embracing everything, everyone and every human activity. Global sustainability can be seen as a condition of a ‘system of systems’.⁵ This system of systems is a set of complex and dynamic interrelationships. It is composed of subsystems that horizontally link the smallest scales of individual choice and collective action. In turn, they interact with other subsystems that aggregate vertically to the global level in terms of their intended and unintended effects on other people and on the planet. In short, global sustainability – the ‘big picture’ – is the top or outermost shell or expression of multiple lower layers of processes, interactions and consequences that feed backwards and forwards on each other.

No one institution controls the process by which the world works and changes. At best, through the United Nations system there is a forum for negotiating – but seldom enforcing – what should be done to stop what is unwanted and reinforce what is desired. But, if the GEO-2000 report is to be believed, this institutional arrangement is not up to the task. For example, modest progress in implementing some aspects of an international agreement intended to redress global warming – known as the Kyoto Protocol – is being outpaced by the negative impacts of population and economic growth. But, in turn, these factors are driven by, on the one hand, basic survival of those who are poor and, on the other, by limitless expectations of the better off about what politics, economics and technology should deliver in terms of personal satisfaction, freedom and a contented life.

The head of UNEP attributes the cause of continuing environmental degradation to two primary forces: ‘…the continued poverty of the majority of the planet’s inhabitants and excessive consumption by the well-off minority’.⁶ Addressing these causes lies at the heart of much of what NGDOs do. Most undertake direct interventions to improve the circumstances of people who are poor. In addition, through campaigns, information and development education they seek to modify the behaviour of those who are rich as well as heightening their sense of interdependence with and obligation to those living in poverty. In other words, in ways not always easy to see or trace, many NGDOs are intimately connected to the ‘big picture’ causes of unsustainability.

The choices NGDOs make in terms of ‘big picture’ advocacy are typically informed by structural constraints to improving the ‘small picture’ lives of people who are poor or in distress. Their pressure for reform is commonly directed towards the policies and practices of powerful political and economic institutions. For example, recent proposals by Western governments to accelerate and ease debt relief for heavily indebted countries can be attributed to the continued advocacy pressure from NGDOs grouped together as Jubilee 2000. NGDO campaigns also contribute to changes in corporate behaviour that cause insecurity and instability. One recent example is the announcement by De Beers – a virtual monopoly in the world trade in diamonds – that it will not, even indirectly, purchase diamonds from Angola. The war-stricken population of this unfortunate country may see an end to conflict if a major source of funds for buying arms dries up. Meanwhile, pushed by non-profit organisations such as the Rockefeller Foundation and Greenpeace, Monsanto – a food commodities giant promoting genetic modification of crops – has publicly stated that it will no longer pursue the introduction of a ‘terminator’ gene designed to stop farmers from reusing seed.

NGDO advocacy and lobbying in the ‘big picture’ can bring indirect change by altering global political or economic structures, business behaviour and public policies. Their influence can affect large numbers of people, both rich and poor. But figures for such impact are impossible to measure or even guess. However, the purpose of this book is not to describe or explore the vast array of paths that link widely diverse NGDOs into the scale of the ‘big picture’. The goal is more limited. The purpose is to use a sustainability perspective to examine organisations that take this requirement seriously in their grassroots work, with a view to enhancing their ability to do so.

To be meaningful, NGDO achievements in high-level policy reform must be translated into real and enduring benefits for the poor. Two problems stand in the way. First, the ‘linear’ model of policy making as an objective process of analysis and choice of options separated from implementation is an inadequate understanding of what actually happens. Instead, policy and policy implementation are best understood as a ‘chaos of purposes and accidents’.⁷ In other words, predictability of a policy’s effects cannot be assumed, nor can the policy process itself.

Second, in terms of both policy formulation and implementation NGDOs are far from in control of how they occur. The potentially ‘big-picture’ impact of policy influence rests on real commitment, coherent decision-making and capabilities of others. It requires decisions to be taken and applied through multiple linkages in world processes and within and between institutions that produce change in the intended way. But unintended effects are numerous, if not the norm. For example, the adoption of a Convention on Children’s Rights is not meant to make families destitute if their labouring child can no longer work. Aid conditions are not meant to create dependency, or disempower and create perverse incentives for recipient governments that lead to ‘fungibility’ and devious relocation of external funds – but they too often do so.⁸ In other words, there is much that can go wrong before the effects of lobbying and campaigns are positively felt by the poor. This has an important lesson and implication for a core approach to sustainability described below.

NGDOs and Many ‘Little Pictures’

How NGDOs, individually and collectively, go about their disparate, geographically spread tasks is explained in detail in Striking a Balance and in numerous other publications.⁹ In brief, their approach typically involves localised, small-scale direct interventions with communities and disadvantaged groups. As described above, the many thousands of ‘small picture’ direct grassroots projects are increasingly being complemented by higher levels of national and international advocacy and lobbying. But we need to retain a sense of proportion and learn about an important consequence coming from the roots of NGDO development work.

Within the ‘big picture’, through their many ‘little pictures’, NGDOs probably directly reach or touch some 15 to 20 per cent of the population in the developing world that are classed as poor and margin-alised.¹⁰ In other words, the scale of their direct outreach and impact on local sustainability is modest at best. Moreover, they are operating in ‘little pictures’ that suffer from a high degree of dependency on and vulnerability to the dynamics of the context – they control a little, influence a few bigger things, but can only appreciate most factors shaping their operational environment.

Together, modest direct outreach and heavy reliance on how others implement policy or corporate reform provide a very important lesson when approaching the issue of sustainability. The lesson is that, in both the ‘big and little pictures’, NGDOs are essentially dependent on other factors in the various systems that reduce or enhance the prospects for sustainability at any level. The significant consequence of this reality is that the lasting, fundamental contribution to sustainability of NGDO work lies not in technologies and social, economic or political reform. The heart of sustainability in development work lies in increasing the capability of people, and of NGDOs themselves, to respond to forces they do not yet control in a particular, insightful, way.

The fundamental challenge is to enhance local ‘response-ability’ directed towards sustainable outcomes in the new and rapidly changing circumstance that poor people and organisations continually find themselves facing.¹¹ Put another way, no condition is permanent or controllable. The core task in sustainability is creating conditions so that benefits endure under changing conditions – in other words to engender adaptability based on an understanding of what sustainability demands at any particular place or moment. This lesson can be summed up in the words of one NGDO leader: ‘Sustainable impact is about creating a continuous ability to adapt.’¹²

This book argues that an NGDO’s continued ability to do and improve on this central task depends on a number of things. First, it calls for generating an external development impact that is itself socially valued and enduring. Second, NGDOs must assure continuity in the resources they need in order to work. Third, they mus...