The Bugbear of Sustainability

In my years as a mission administrator I never quite came to terms with the language of sustainability. From the 1990s onward there has been a suspicion of development projects that are started by foreigners and run by outside money. Most experts in the field will grant you that good initiatives have to start that way, but the conventional wisdom nowadays demands that the running and funding of projects has to come from the inside -- that is, from stakeholders in the community (or communities) being served.

That's all well and good. Except that some excellent things will never be sustainable. Take, for instance, Bible translation. The book publishing industry in rich economies is in trouble, and that's with a scale of potential readers that numbers into the millions. Imagine producing a book hundreds of pages long for no more than 10,000 people -- and that's if everyone in the language group buys a copy. Publishing Bibles for minority language communities will never be financially sustainable. You can't sell enough books to even pay for the paper, much less cover the other costs of publication and distribution.  Hence my discomfort with development models that push for sustainability.

In a book review in the Sep/Oct 2015 edition of Books and Culture, Naomi Haynes has named some of the problems that underlie these assumptions about sustainable development projects. Her review of the book Having People, Having Heart by China Scherz largely blames the modern Western concept of autonomous personhood. The book contrasts two different charity organizations in Uganda -- a struggling local NGO which is arguably sustainable, and an effective-yet-unsustainable Franciscan house for the poor. Scherz argues that the individualistic, time-centered ("your funding runs out in X months") post-enlightenment model undermines traditional patron-client relationships, through which many of the world's peoples define and understand their sense of self. In other words, dependence is built in to the structure of many societies. Charities that work within those structures sometimes do more good than ones which set arbitrary timelines for local leaders to take over projects on their own and find their own funding.

The language surrounding sustainable development often seeks to right the wrongs of colonialist attitudes in which the rich world's leaders dictated their own goals to the less powerful. However, the insistence on local stakeholder ownership that severs ties between the donor and client may be just as colonialist as the previous models, in a 21st-century way.