Sustainability

From EvaluationWiki

Originally, this meant the capacity to exist after immediate support is completed or withdrawn; temporal durability; recently it has been extended to include this capacity from the time of start-up onwards. Often taken to be equivalent to 'resilience to risk' but not quite the same, since the latter is more general and requires a general 'bulletproof' quality with respect to unexpected disasters including natural disasters, whereas the former refers mainly to continuation after the termination of external funding. However, it should be noted that, in practice, we often expect sustainability to include the capacity for political and perhaps also environmental autonomy as well as fiscal autonomy. In recent years, sustainability has become a major item to value in the evaluation of international development projects, partly because it was for long ignored with the consequent recurrent failure of development projects to produce any lasting benefits for the recipient nations or communities. Planning for sustainability is therefore important, and its handmaiden, evaluation for sustainability, should now be a requirement for competent evaluation in the international sphere. One important component of such evaluation is attention to the required infrastructure, which is often a contextual rather than an internal requirement for success, but must be specified in the evaluation.