Back to reality

I would like to ground things a little bit and talk about real examples of moving towards living sustainably. Although this might come across as a bit more about "green living" than "sustainable development" my take is that it demonstrates an example of what development could be aiming towards.

So we'll start our little tour right here in Kitchener/Waterloo. There are quite a number of people who are working together to live as sustainably as possible. One example can be found at Little City Farm. This couple grows much of their own food, generates much of their own electricity (of which they minimize their usage) and many other green efforts. The key is that they do this all on a normal city plot, not out in the country.

A note for two of the links on their site. One is to Bullfrog Power - a power company here in Ontario that sells power from renewable sources. Another is to the EF Schumacher Society which I had never heard of before. According to their website,

"Founded in 1980 the mission of the Schumacher Society is to promote the building of strong local economies that link people, land, and community. To accomplish this we develop model programs, including local currencies, community land trusts, and micro-lending; host lectures and other educational events; publish papers; and maintain a library to engage scholars and inspire citizen-activists."

Very interesting stuff!

But what about the things that simply cannot be produced reasonably independently...
For food there are food co-ops where people can buy local food (which is often organic and all that) - eg Bailey's Local Food.
For clothing, appliances and electronics check out Good Guide, a website that ranks all sorts of products from toilet paper to cell phones. There are a number of these kinds of sites and IMHO they are still fairly rudimentary and probably not very accurate but I think Good Guide is a strong start.

But what about sustainable communities (this is where Jordan could probably provide much better links) the US Green Building Council has put out guidelines for a sustainable buildings and even neighborhoods through its LEED program.

I will save your time and let you surf some of those sites but I wanted to tie it back to development. I wonder how our development efforts in the rest of the world would be different if this kind of mentality were much more pervasive in our society. I say this with the whole actions affect beliefs conversation in the back of my mind. If our development efforts concentrated on changing developing AND developed countries into a sustainable society instead of using the wildly changing western society as a "goal" I think things would be a lot different and the real weight of development would be an international burden, not just for the developing world.

Any other links to what a sustainable society looks like? I know they're out there, I'm just stopping myself from searching for "sustainable society".

Kurtis (in Waterl00)

"Everyone has a plan 'till they get punched in the mounth" - M. Tyson

Source:

http://www.moninoaviation.com/g7.html

Planning and Managing Development. This is the title of one of my courses (modules) for term 2 (which started on Monday, January 31, 2011) – it’s also the subject of the last few chapters in Small is Beautiful. Assuming we know what development is (and this, as Kurt and I have shown is a grand assumption), this module looks at ways in which it can be planned and managed.

The idea that we can plan anything should be met with some skepticism. After all, we have no idea what the future holds – none whatsoever. We can look backward and see how things have happened.  We can observe patterns and cycles from the past and make statements such as: “barring this or that, we expect such and such to occur in the future...” In a highly controlled environment, such as that of the chemistry lab, we can make very accurate predictions about what will happen if we follow certain steps.  And we can make up procedures that, if followed correctly will very likely always produce the same result in the future. But what about in the world of human development, can we extrapolate our experiences from the natural sciences to the worlds of economic and social development?

I say we can’t.  And I wonder that the same people, who jumped up and down with glee when it was ‘proved’ in 1989 that centrally planned economies can never work, had been in the business of centrally planning the economies of developing countries for years. Finally they too had to admit that their version of central planning didn’t work either.  And out went structural adjustment programs. To be sure, the International Financial Institutions have not altered course drastically, only slightly – still holding onto the basic idea that if only the market or the government or participation can be ‘got right’ struggling economies and millions of poor people can get ahead in the world.

Source: 

http://www.polyp.org.uk/cartoons/democracy/polyp_cartoon_IMF_Structural_Adjustment.jpg

In terms of planning development, maybe we can look to the past to find patterns that can be replicated. But looking to the development histories of countries like the UK and Canada, there is no pattern that emerges, no formula, no central plan that our forefathers pulled out of the air and set about to implement. No, what occurred in changing Britton from a feudal mess of mass poverty, huge inequality and low life expectancy into the prosperous nation it is today was a messy, unplanned, often unfair, sometimes bloody, always unpredictable process of social evolution.

But that said, Kurt and I are both doing these degrees so we can be involved, in some way, in the planning of projects we think will help other people get somewhat closer to the standard of living we enjoy (I don’t like to say it like, but I think it’s true at one level). So, do we think we can do it better, find another way beyond the standard Development model for top-down planning of big projects employing ‘best practices’.

I think so. But I don’t yet presume to know how.  Attempts at what was called ‘process planning’ (in the 1980s) prove that non-linear planning is fraught with difficulty. It involves very long time-frames (like 20 years, not 5), committed staff, willing to put their professionalist pride aside and see project stakeholders as equal contributors, a messy, unpredictable learning cycle, full of surprises. Process planning involves planning to work yourself out of a job.  It’s not glamorous, it might not pay that well and it will probably mean that you (the planner) will learn as much as the stakeholder, if not more (Bond and Hulme 1999).  It means treating poor people like human beings.

Jordan (Manchester)

Reference:

Bond, R. & Hulme, D. (1999) ‘Process Approaches to Development: Theory and Sri Lankan Practice’, World Development, 27(8), pp.1339-1358.

How Mr Schumacher?

Just out... "We mined our way to growth," UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. "We burned our way to prosperity. We believed in consumption without consequences. Those days are gone. In the 21st century, supplies are running short and the global thermostat is running high. ... It is easy to mouth the words 'sustainable development,' but to make it happen we have to be prepared to make major changes - in our lifestyles, our economic models, our social organization, and our political life,"

Here is the full press release. Ban has some other great quotes in there, I just hope he actually gets heard.

Back to SIB - After, doing a fairly good job of explaining the deficiencies of our current economic systems and how those aspects are passed on to our development methodology Schumacher launches into his proposal. It hinges on two aspects; intermediate technology and rural development.

Schumacher uses an example to define intermediate technology which developed into Practical Action which Jordan has mentioned before. If a symbolic technology costs $1 in the developing world it may cost $1000 in the developed world. (Think hoe vs tractor which has an even greater disparity.) Schumacher agrees that the $1 technology holds back the user and needs to be improved on but he is adamant that the $1000 technology simply represents a leap far to large not only economically but educationally and from an socio-economic perspective. The development of a $100 technology would not only be much more achievable for the target economy but also more sustainable. He argues that much more effort needs to be put into developing those $100 technologies; most of the world's effort goes into developing $1000 technology for the developed world.

His second point which he makes in a chapter called "Two Million Villages" is that this intermediate technology will enable a sustainable rural population. (He views urbanization as a self perpetuating sickness. Zero jobs rurally means people move to the city for the slightest chance of employment which means that more resources are focused on urban centers and the rural setting becomes even more of an nonviable lifestyle.) The intermediate technology will keep many rural people employed. (He strongly opposes $1000 technology because, while it may be much more efficient in terms of output per person, it keeps very few people actually employed and therefore harms the economy even further. Sorry for all the parentheses!)

So for most of his points he's preaching to the choir but here I'm not so sure. I've seen some very intermediate technology that is still inappropriate for the end user, maybe the education was still lacking but I'm not sure. As well, I'm not so sure that more effort developing an intermediate technology is needed. IMHO, India and China are superb sources of intermediate technology (I'm thinking of the ubiquitous black mamba bike as one example) and they will identify intermediate technology and create the device and market if it is an option.

I think he hits the nail on the head with his "proofs" that development work should concentrate on providing employment. Schumacher stresses this point from a number of angles and in my opinion that should be a fundamental question that provides a backdrop to any development work. How much employment, what kind, how long, etc. Instead we think about just the results (clean water, electricity, child health and infant mortality, etc). Any comments on development efforts that are very specifically about providing meaningful and sustainable employment?

Kurtis (in Waterloo)