This week, I had the pleasure to represent EcoAgriculture Partners (and livetweet) the Worldwatch Institute’s State of the World 2015: Confronting Hidden Threats to Sustainability. The event focused on the underreported consequences of an unsustainable global system. Along with presenting the most pressing problems the world faces, the event highlighted a possible solution: an interdisciplinary approach.
To face the world’s current challenges in climate mitigation, resource use, food security and so on, Michael Renner, senior researcher at the Worldwatch Institute, emphasized the need for changes in social, political and economic sectors.
Gary Gardner, director of publications for the Worldwatch Institute, stressed the need to treat agricultural resources, such as land, water and a stable climate, as strategic and critical. He pointed out that both public and private sector roles are needed in order to protect farmland and resources. The Landscapes for People, Food and Nature Initiative is on the same page with Gardner; a participatory, multi-stakeholder planning process is key to finding sustainable solutions.
As the secretariat of the LPFN, EcoAgriculture Partners emphasizes a multi-sectoral approach to mitigating climate change and addressing agricultural issues. A core part of the Initiative is promoting integrated landscape initiatives (ILIs), which emphasize the importance of different groups and stakeholders coming together to find complementary solutions to common problems that reduce trade-offs and strengthen synergies.
Catherine Machalaba, program coordinator for Health and Policy at EcoHealth Alliance covered human-animal health links. The recent emergence of infectious diseases in humans from wildlife, like Ebola, is driven by factors including biodiversity loss, changing climates, and so on. Machalaba says that human-animal health links are driven by complex dynamics, including ecological factors, like species composition, landscapes/habitats and the climate, transmission factors, evolutionary factors and so on.
To find solutions, Machalaba emphasized bringing sectors together. She added that the benefits of involving many sectors to find innovative solutions are boundless. Renner concluded the discussion by stating:
“We have to understand these problems in an interdisciplinary way in order to find sustainable solutions.”
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State of the World 2015: Confronting Hidden Threats to Sustainability
Marissa Sherman is a communications intern at EcoAgriculture Partners. She studies sustainable agriculture at the University of Maryland, College Park. She cares about all things sustainable food-related, but focuses on farm-based education initiatives and how the private sector can make sustainability the norm.
Photo courtesy of Conservation South Africa.
Hans Groenendijk
May 4, 2015 at 8:35am“Sketch of an integrated development vision”
by J.J.(Hans) Groenendijk
By Hans Groenendijk
TISE Consultancy BV
The Hague, 19 October 2014
Developments based on integration as leading principle instead of development by sectorial approaches will be more successful and sustainable.
Most development programs and projects have been designed as a result of identification of specific material or immaterial needs in an often well-defined geographical or administrative region or locality. Of course in solving the problem of satisfying those needs the entire economic, social, cultural and ecological context is taken into account but this is centred in most cases around a sectorial approach. This often causes development projects to behave like the buttons of a ventilator. Push in one and another pops out. You solve a problem and other problems arise.
Although in general projects fit perfectly in overall rural development policies the absence of explicit cross references with existent, past and planned programs and projects is striking.
Collaboration between projects, departments etc. are hardly existent. This is well known and often recognised but has seldom led to feasible and satisfactory solutions.
Many projects to become opportunistic and complex and less focused on development objectives. M&E and follow up consistent with these become an illusion. Problems arising will be considered to have the same status and priority and thus are solved as soon as they appear instead of viewing them as integral parts of a contextual development cycle.
Projects seem to lead a life of their own and there seems to be an equal tendency to funnel
towards specific objectives without seeking connections and synchronisation with parallel developments in other disciplines. So rural development programs rarely address related urban development, agriculture rarely addresses (local) industry or infrastructure development, and natural resource management (NRM) and forestry seldom touches on production of wood for construction or furniture production, to name but a few examples.
This lack of complementarity and coherence provokes inconsistencies and contradictions of different approaches and is cause for many projects to be less effective and efficient and often to fail altogether. What is missing in these projects is associative thinking in terms of integrated development. The creative and conceptive force applied to resolve problems of technical, procedural and e.g. logistic nature is rather limited.
This triggers the question how to realise a true integrated development model in which the above issues will all be addressed at their appropriate time and place in the development cycle. Projects offering solutions for specific sectorial problems are often presented as solutions for rural and/or urban society as a whole. However coherent approaches and consistent development objectives of projects and programs are rare.
In international cooperation long term development policies and programs in different sectors and disciplines have been distributed over different departments and their different donors. This is not in favour of integrated approaches.
Solutions can be found in defining development and formulating programs based on integration concepts with different projects and phases equipped with the necessary “plugs” and “sockets” that can be connected or disconnected earlier or later in time dependant on situation and/or necessity of the entire development cycle.
These kinds of developments can take place, not necessarily simultaneously but within the same planning and programming cycle and dynamic and integrated development models become possible with great flexibility and well defined phases.
Governments should be encouraged to exercise their sovereign responsibility to improve their coordinating role e.g. by supporting existing or new coordinating bodies that would receive financial and technical assistance to facilitate integrated approaches of rural development.