Facing the Future
Sustainability of Development Projects: Lessons Learned from Malawi View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lila Khatiwada
The sustainability of development projects has been a concern for donors, practitioners, and researchers globally. Using mixed methods in data collection, we examined the sustainability of a food security and environment management project in eight southern districts in Malawi after four years of completion of the project. Using a sustainability framework, this paper looks at the factors promoting and hindering the sustainability of different activities promoted by the project. Particularly, we examine what activities promoted by the project are still functional and the factors responsible for this. Further, we also examine what activities promoted by the project are no longer functional and the factors responsible for this. The findings of this study help to expand our understanding of the sustainability of development projects, particularly what works and what does not in international development.
Development of Community-level Resilience Capacity to Natural Hazards for Environmental and Social Justice Challenged Communities: A Conceptualization View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session James Kevin Summers
Through the use of existing models and tools, the parish-level resilience to natural hazards was determined for central Louisiana (US) parishes subject to flooding, hurricanes, and other potential natural climatic events. Through consultation with state officials and local community groups, candidate environmental justice (EJ) and social justice (SJ) communities were selected to develop resilience capacity enhancement plans to address potential adverse parish and community outcomes of natural hazard events. Through community engagement workshops strategies for resilience capacity enhancement were determined and plans for their implementation were developed. Continuing studies will monitor the success of their strategy implementations and will assess the transferability of the approach to other candidate communities.
Featured Local Solutions to Climate Change and Human Displacement: Can Rural and Smaller Communities Play a Role in Resettling Climate Refugees and Mitigating the Environmental Impacts of Increased Urbanization? View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Stacey Haugen
The impacts of global warming and environmental degradation are driving human insecurity across the globe. Rising sea levels, record-breaking temperatures, and extreme droughts and flooding are forcing people to flee their homes in unprecedented numbers. At the same time, rural places, which are vital to fighting climate change through the preservation of biodiversity, protection of natural water sources, and production of food and resources, are struggling with declining populations and poverty across the globe. In this context, this project asks: Can the resettlement of refugees in rural and smaller communities in developed countries (in Canada specifically, but also across Europe and in the United States and Australia) offer localized benefits for refugees and host communities, while also addressing the global climate refugee crises? The purpose of this paper is to discern if rural resettlement can offer an opportunity to: (1) Resettle more refugees in developed countries; (2) Be attentive to and mitigate the environmental impacts of urbanization; and, (3) Support rural communities and the people that live there. This project involves a scoping review of the Canadian and international literatures, and focus groups with rural settlement service providers. Our findings suggest that rural resettlement presents positive opportunities for receiving countries, and for rural residents and refugees. Important migration and resettlement initiatives are already happening in rural Canada and beyond, despite being overlooked within the existing literature and policy frameworks. As the climate crisis worsens, understanding the opportunities of rural resettlement will be vital to facilitating successful and additional resettlement options.
Some Links between Sustainability and Well-Being View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mubashir Qasim
Sustainability aims to ensure that people live their lives without compromising the well-being of future generations. Increasing well-being by providing more goods and services to consume is a sustainability challenge. There are two opposing schools of thought on the consumption of natural resources: strong sustainability and weak sustainability. Proponents of strong sustainability emphasize the preservation of natural capital in each period because they argue that it cannot be replaced with any other type of capital. By contrast, weak sustainability scholars argue that natural resource can be consumed to build other forms of capital in which case sustainability requires that the aggregated monetised value of all capital stocks is non-declining or preferably increasing over the time. In this paper, we propose to adopt a balanced approach instead of taking either of these extreme positions where critical natural capital (CNC) limits are defined by strong sustainability and, within that limit, substitutability between various types of capital is allowed for economic efficiency and growth in total wealth. In such frameworks, weak sustainability indicates the minimum sustainability requirement for an economy in which all types of capitals are substitutable under the limits of CNC.
