When I was in graduate school in Washington DC, I focused practical
study for my Philosophy and Social Policy degree on environmental ethics and the
ethics of international development.
Without explicitly dating myself, I’ll tell you that this was
around the time of the Rio Earth Summit, and sustainability was the new
buzzword. I watched as the concept of sustainability became ‘sustainable
development’. I saw the term ‘unpacked’ as philosophers like to say, in journal
articles and report frameworks. Eventually sustainable development was institutionalized
and formalized into organizational department names, job titles and new
academic journals.
Sustainability still makes sense to me today as a useful
mental framework, in the basic structure I learned back then. Sustainable
development is about meeting the needs of the present without compromising the
ability to meet needs in the future. Three kinds of needs must be met in a
complementary way: economics, environment and society.
More recently, I notice people using the word sustainability
in a way that implies the word ‘self-‘ in front of sustainable; a program or
development intervention is called sustainable if it can perpetuate itself
without continued external support. It keeps itself going through permanent
behavior change or natural incentives to generate necessary resources. Teaching
a woman to fish to so she can feed herself and her family into the future would
be considered sustainable. Giving her fish might no longer be considered truly sustainable,
even if doing so causes no harm to future economic, environmental or social
goods.
In other words, sustainable development has to do more than
simply avoid depleting the economic, environmental and social resources of the far
future. That’s a given. Today, sustainable programs are expected to generate
their own resources (at least eventually) to maintain activities and benefits
today in present or near future.
It’s a higher standard and probably appropriate in many
cases. It implies a greater degree of engagement and responsibility from those designing
and implementing the program, including those being helped. The fisher must see
continued value in fishing for herself, or the program fails to be sustainable.
So now what about resilience?
I wonder if it is on the same trajectory as sustainability. The
international conferences and programmatic categories are emerging already. There
have been rich discussions of what the concept means for many months now. Will
organizational and job title changes follow? How is it changing what we see,
what we value in policy and how we plan and implement development programs for
the future?
Lawrence Haddad thoughtfully raises a number of important
points about resilience as a ‘mobilizing metaphor.’ He concludes:
Much of our current development
thinking was developed in the last half of the 20th century--in a world very
different from today. Even if resilience has no unique conceptual
contribution (and for me the jury is still out), it is clearly resonating with many
different stakeholders.
Perhaps the greatest contribution
of resilience will be to create the space for new ideas to flourish and help us
move development, food security and nutrition more decisively from the 20th to
the 21st century. Time will tell.
My Inner Philosopher looks forward to seeing what happens
next!