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NewsNewsletter – Column HSustainable ImpactsThe sustainability of development interventions is critical to any notion of development, yet many development practitioners treat it as an add-on or encumbrance in investment, design and implementation. Similarly, agency development guidelines rarely give any emphasis to sustainability and impact. Sustainability relates to development outcomes. Having agreed to an intended outcome, a sustainability strategy is designed to achieve that outcome. Conceptually, the sustainable outcome and an appropriate strategy for its achievement work hand in glove. The specification of what is intended to be sustained (which is the outcome) is important. Once the outcome is agreed, a strategy to achieve its sustainability must be devised. Development is about applied common sense so let us apply some to an example. The output of a simple development intervention is a road. The outcome of the road intervention is year round vehicular access to services and markets. An important distinction has been made between an output and an outcome, as the intention is to sustain the outcome. The strategy for achieving the sustainable outcome (year round access to markets) would be capacity development of those responsible for maintenance of the road in the form of management, resources and technical capability. This strategy implies culture change, which may be management, but can also involve community formation and organisation, and technical engineering orientation and awareness. Implicit in the notion of a sustainable outcome from an intervention is the concept of change. This involves people, and how people think and go about tasks. There is little scope for an outcome to be sustainable unless there has been change in the way people think about the outcome. With the road outcome, year round access to services and markets would not be sustained unless people who are responsible for maintenance of the access road change their management culture to road maintenance. So, year round access to services and markets is a sustainable outcome from the road investment. This is achieved through a sustainability strategy which involves capacity building that enables attitude and management culture change in stakeholders and beneficiaries. Putting this change into practice is what makes access to services and markets sustainable. An assumption in this example is that financial resources will be made available by government/community to enable management cultural changes to be employed. One should reflect on this assumption for, if it is invalid, the outcome may not be sustainable unless there is a strategy that recognises the situation and adopts an approach which does not rely on the validity of the assumption. We now have a sustainable outcome, which was achieved because of an appropriate sustainability strategy. What about its impact? This brings us to the original reason for the intervention. The reason could be poverty reduction, income generation, reduced morbidity or increased life expectancy. It is hoped that the impact achieved is that which was intended, and it relates to the overall reason for the intervention. However, the impact of the outcome could also be unintended, and this could be either positive or negative. The impact magnitude of an intervention outcome will depend on the sustainability of the outcome. With the road example, the impact initially may be positive for income generation. However, as the road deteriorates through lack of maintenance, and access becomes limited, the impact on income or whatever may decrease. Sustainability is a word loosely used in development. For explicit meaning, the term needs to be related to both strategy and its outcome. When strategy directly relates to outcome, it is possible to determine the effectiveness of the strategy in achieving a sustainable outcome and the impact of the outcome can be measured against the overall development objective agreed for the intervention. Ron Staples Return to News |
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