No-Fault, No-Brainer, Non-Bureaucratic, Grassroots, World-Wide Sustainability Grant Program

The No-Fault, Non-Bureaucratic, No-Brainer, Grassroots, World-Wide Sustainability Grant Program (Think about it!)

Sometimes, even if he has to do it alone, and his conduct seems to be mad, a man must set an example, and so draw people's souls out of their solitude, and spur them to some act of brotherly love, that the great idea does not die.
- Dostoyevsky, 'The Brothers Karamazov'

Proposal in brief
Message from Stockholm
The Importance of "Pattern Breaks"
Background
Why it should work
To conclude

After we completed our work on the Stockholm Partnerships for Sustainable Cities, the next task was to see if we might report something useful to the then-forthcoming (September 2002) United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. I undertook the following as a personal initiative, and while it did not get the play I think it needed in Johannesburg (not so easy with some 22,000 participants and more than 10,000 delegates), I am continuing to try to draw attention to this idea, which I think at the very least has the seeds of an approach that could indeed be very useful as we make our tortuous way to more sustainable behaviour and a sustainable world.

The proposal in brief

A call for the creation of a world wide, 'no fault', zero-bureaucracy grants program

To provide one thousand high profile World Sustainability Grants to nominated local projects in cities and communities around the world.
To start as soon as possible and run for full year as a "pattern break" demonstration
Projects do not apply; they are nominated by an established international network.
Each grant is for a flat $10,000.
And supported by a high quality local and national media campaign.
Two thirds of all awards to go to projects and teams in the Third World.
Two thirds to be led by or oriented to serve the special needs and perceptions of women and girls
No conditions or requirements of award. No repayment.
Project teams invited to feed back information and results through an integrated, freely accessible web site (see http://ngroups.com/stockholm)

* * *

A world wide 'no fault' zero-bureaucracy grants program to support worthy local sustainability projects and teams in cities and communities around the world -- putting into their hands with little fuss or work on their part a high-visibility media-supported prize and cash award of ten thousand dollars or euros. We have seen in many places that relatively modest amounts of money applied with the right light touch can do a great deal in many local project contexts.

The proposed award process is based on a trusted nomination, a quick review, and a cash award to the grant recipient, along with an invitation to cooperate by reporting succinctly via the web on progress, accomplishments and problems over the following year. That's it. There is no policing of the awards or the teams, no complicated administrative apparatus to keep track of what they are doing with the money, and no requirements to justify their performance.

If accompanied by a high quality media and presentation program, such a grant can also serve as a much needed local push for the project and the team behind it. Especially when the award comes from a high profile international program. These projects and teams are often working with limited if any local support or recognition, so turning this around is very much one of the main objectives of this whole program.

The entire process is to be mediated by the extensive informal international network developed not only through the Stockholm Partnerships program, but also the efforts and networks of the many groups and programs who are sharing information, contacts and works in this literally world wide network for sustainability. Most of the work on the network to get the job done will be provided by volunteers, on the understanding that when we get together on things like this we all move forward.

Listen Johannesburg . . . to what these 228 cities that have come together to join their voices and experience with the Stockholm Partnerships are saying! These are not academics, arm chair theorists, or bureaucrats speaking. These are messages from the people in the trenches, working with these challenges, and trying to deal with the barriers that are being placed before them, not all of which truly need to be there. Listen to them carefully Johannesburg, and shape your plans, recommendations and intentions for the next ten years taking into full consideration these voices and their real world experiences.
New Thinking: We badly need new out-of-box thinking and action on our chosen approach emphasizing partnerships -- bearing in mind honestly that much of the stuff that parades as such till now often has more to do with intentions and displays than hard work, devotion and accomplishment. Making partnerships work in a real world filled with a wide range of motivations, needs and behaviour patterns is a VERY DIFFICULT challenge, so it needs all of our attention, unfettered critical analysis and creative interaction in order to build a truly effective global partnership frame.
Propinquity: Like the word or not, this is a huge and even critical area of knowledge building and concertation that requires our priority attention. All of our 228 projects are local - by which we mean 'place specific'. Unlike concepts like globalization where market forces are driven by non-local forces and interests - at times for the better, and others for the worse -- , these are initiatives that are intended to make the places in which they take place better places to live, work and raise our children. In an era in which ever more people are ever more rootless, rushing away from the country side or small towns into mega-cities, leaving their place of birth which is not offering the safety or opportunities that are needed for 'somewhere else', it has to be said that the concept of propinquity or place has taken a bad hit over these last decades. Counsel comes from economists, above all, that people should go where the 'opportunities' are, and hence the whole fabric of laws and incentives and actual practices is geared to this collective rootlessness, and the emptiness and loss that goes with it. The projects that have come in to the Stockholm Partnerships for Sustainable Cities are demonstrating clearly that it is possible to preserve the enormous advantages of established social and economic structures, without having to abandon them for mindless displacements whose total systemic costs are enormous.
Local Initiative: Scratch any one of the 228 projects and you will invariably find behind them one driven person or a small core group that have decided to make their good idea work - this despite the barriers that they know they are going to have to face. If you were to look for a shortlist of short words to describe them high on the list of candidates would have to be 'unexpected', 'chaotic', determined', and at times 'solitary' and 'abandoned'. Which brings up the following timely question: Could such initiatives ever come out of a tightly organized traditional bureaucracy? Or do we need to be looking around for entirely new approaches, new models to make for more and better projects of this sort?
Partnership Rigor: In this respect, we propose that all concerned be much more rigorous and demanding of any group or person that signs on to a give project or program as a 'partner'. Partnership in a sustainable cities initiative is not just a pleasant word and easy credit for adding ones name or face to a list. If anyone shows up and indicates that they want to sign on as a Partner -- and the only kind of Partners where should be are Working Partners -- there should be a serious effort made to define the exact contribution that is going to be required of them, and if active engagement and meaningful support is not forthcoming, the partnership link should either be rethought or terminated.
Recognize and Reconstruct: We need to look far more critically and the relationship between national government and international organizations and the whole process of local initiatives at the city or neighborhood level. The truth is that over the last decade, these higher levels of government have by and large been poor partners for local initiatives. This needs to be recognized explicitly, and a serious effort needs to be launched to do something about this.
Positive Proposals: To resume: The decade since Rio has, it must be said, not been a great success of government partnerships with sustainable city projects around the world. To the contrary! This point to be made, and it would be utterly hypocritical as well as counter-productive to turn the Johannesburg Summit into a round of self-congratulation as to what has been accomplished in this respect over the last ten years. We need to come up with and stress positive proposals for the future, and not to engage in finger pointing about the past. It is easy enough to criticize the evident failings over this last decade of national government, international organizations and others who have the potential, the responsibility of being active and positive partners in the kind of bottom-up projects and developments which are so desperately needed in and around our cities. But in preparing our Message to Johannesburg our goal should be to stress not the criticism of past failures, but instead to focus attention on the scope for positive reforms and new structures and arrangements that can lead to a world wide flowing of initiative from the bottom up, from the people and from the cities.

Back to top

The Importance of "Pattern Breaks"

It's my theory that the only way to break out of our present mega-quandary of wretched unsustainability will be by "breaking pattern" in several significant ways. The numbers tell the story -- and good thoughts, moral suasion, and scolding will not do the job. I can promise you that. We need something stronger, more concrete and close at hand.

If sustainability and social justice are your concern, rather than wringing hands and calling for more doses of world treaties, world policing, 'world government' and the like, no matter how comforting and wise all that might sound, we can try something simpler while others worry about the planetary governance track.

We can start by looking around and see if there is anything already going on which might give us something solid to build on. And, if you are diligent, it turns out that there is an exploding universe of good examples of how to do better. Which, in my view, can help us get off on some interesting and perhaps even useful paths.

I suggest that we need a wake-up call and that we have in hand plenty of raw material to do just that. We need, in a phrase, to shock ourselves by getting to know about this exploding universe of good but for the most part well hidden examples of how to do better. To do this, I suggest we need to find, encourage and publicize ways to do large numbers of new and surprising and very different kinds of things that are working in specific places all over the planet, which can in turn set us off on new mental maps and in turn behavioral patterns.

The real trick is that modest first step - which is to recognize that our truly creative role in making this happen cannot be to attempt to "command and control" new patterns and projects, no matter how clever we may think we are and how much we learned in school. Rather we need to find out what is it that we can do to unleash the tremendous energies and intelligence that are already out there and working in our cities but in many ways being frustrated and thwarted by present arrangements. If, that is, you believe in people.

We received some splendid tuition on this recently as result of work done over the last year with an outstanding collection of no less than 228 innovative local project teams from 53 countries uncovered by the international jury of the Stockholm Partnerships for Sustainable Cities, many of which are succeeding in accomplishing an awful lot under tough conditions with very little money.

One small project cutting traffic congestion and accidents, and still getting people to work and school on time in Delhi. Another cleaning up local water supplies with low cost technology in the Palestinian Territories. A third teaching science to kids in remote areas with low cost distance learning tools. Programs trading guns for hand-cranked radios in war-torn Niger. Pocket parks in depressed East Bloc cities. Clown doctors cheering sick children in hospitals in slums of Brazilian cites.

In all 228 shining examples of local ingenuity, integrity and motivation. With tens of thousands more standing in the wings, just waiting for that first small guiding push.

All of which, if we take the time to look and learn, tells us what to do next.

Back to top

Background

This project is an expression of faith in the ability of people and local groups to attack and solve their own problems, with a little help and encouragement from outside - instead of waiting for "government" to solve all their problems for them.

It is predicated on the notion that sustainability and social justice are more likely to be advanced palpably through efforts that take place from the bottom up than from the top down (or at least we would make the point that without these grassroots projects, there is no path to sustainability).

It is also a vote for good faith, good judgment, neighborliness and effective networking - as opposed to heavy handed administration, centralized planning, and remorseless policing.

This proposal is the direct result of work done over the last year with an outstanding collection of no less than 228 innovative local project teams from 53 countries, uncovered by the international jury of the Stockholm Partnerships for Sustainable Cities, many of which are succeeding in accomplishing an awful lot under tough conditions with very little money. (See www.partnerships.stockholm.se/ for details.) The challenge now is to build on this experience and sell the world's main aid agencies, governments and foundations on the idea that what is needed is an entirely new development stimulus pattern and process. In this case, a technology-mediated no-fault sustainability project machine. .

One such world wide No-Fault demo as outlined here would cost a round $10 million -- small change compared to most of the funded development projects going on today. To put this into perspective, it's about what you have to shell out for a single urban highway interchange in your city. (As if you really need one more of those, that is.)

Then, when this works out over 2003 and the message begins to get through, the next step can be to turn it into a structured ten-year zero-bureaucracy, zero-control effort -- meaning that just one such program over the decade will lay the base for a total of ten thousand independent grassroots development projects -- projects that otherwise might never have come into existence. And all out there on the Net for all to see and learn from. And from there ten such programs running in parallel - why not, once the new pattern has been established? -- would bring about and support one hundred thousand new sustainability projects on line over the decade.

Might that make a difference? Might that help change the ways you and we think about all this? And the choices we make? We leave you to ponder that for yourselves. You and the World Bank and the European Commission and every government, company, financial institution, foundation and committed individual on this gasping planetary block.

High Visibility Mega Program. The point of all this is to challenge, to change even, accepted thinking as to how we can make our planet, starting in the places we live, work and bring up our children, into a more sustainable and more socially just place. To get the point across, there must be something that sharply, egregiously even, defies the known thinking, paths and mechanisms. So we need hundreds, thousands of these things flowing out of a well oiled mechanism if we are to catch the attention of enough people and institutions to make a difference in the critical next decade ahead.
No application - all projects nominated by our network (nominator thus goes on line for the program, Grameem Bank style)
One size grant: $10k -accompanied by a short list of suggestions, questions and requests (non-obligatory)
"Zero" Program Management Costs: All money that comes in for the grants goes out for the grants. As to covering these costs, well we just have to be smart and diligent. But the 100% pass-through in itself has to be newsworthy and pattern-breaking.
First rate media support package. (We invite the grant recipient to help out with local media contacts, while we take care of the international side of things.)
A net-mediated support network (of which award winners are invited to become a creative element). This network may consist of a hive of networks or programs - or a well organized portal to an ever-evolving array of information and support nodes.)
Recipients invited to submit a short "final report", led by original nominator, which goes on the web to become a resource and point of information and encouragement for others seeking ideas or help along these lines.
The supporting web site will also provide an information point available for others (agencies, aid groups, foundations, individuals) looking for projects, programs and ideas they want to support.
Eventually and if things work out, grant recipients will receive an invitation to become a nominator in turn in their country, region or area of competence.
And would it not be splendid if we could pull the whole thing together into an annual, Nobel style award ceremony, of the sort that we have just so successfully had with the Stockholm Partnerships program? Perhaps with the City of Stockholm taking a lead role in this once again.

And then in a year we can look at what we have accomplished and take it from there.

The proposal is positive -- and it is action oriented.

It is attractive, easy to understand - and once you have it in mind does not require endless reflection or discussion to get straight.

It provides an unarguable way to achieve concrete, cost effective sustainability results in a very short time frame.

We have in hand the mechanisms both to make it work and to ensure that the impacts will be widely known and universally available

It is deeply challenging of the status quo - the pattern of stasis -- and hence worthy of attention and at very least public discussion and debate.

It promises to open up, based on striking near term results that serve as proof, a whole new paradigm of organization of action for sustainability and social justice

It provides a new shaping example of personal responsibility, community and democracy.

It shows great faith in people and their sense of enterprise (as opposed to large centralized, bureaucratized, intellectualized, lawyerized, even sovietized constructs along with their assumption of a basically sheep-like passive citizenry)

It does not require another international treaty or extensive negotiations and horse-trading in order to start to make its concrete contribution to sustainable development.

Nor does it require yet further research, more preparatory conferences, expert missions, staff build ups, investments in real estate, supplemental budgets, etc.

It's dead cheap given its potential impact

And finally, it can be put into motion with just one partner and decision point - a sponsor brave enough, wise enough, and responsible enough to back the 2003 program, and then just stand aside and let it happen.

Homepage

The Commons @Forum

Post Office