For decades, we’ve heard about the perils of rampant development that experts said were “unsustainable.” Poverty, we learned, blights a quarter of the globe. Diseases overwhelm health clinics and divert funds needed for economic growth. Among nations, conflict arises over wealth, consumption rates, and resources.

But the solutions have never been as clear as the problems. When it comes to development, what does “sustainable” mean?

The term “sustainable development” surfaced at the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972. But it wasn’t until 1987 that a working definition emerged. That year, the World Commission on Environment and Development issued Our Common Future, which defined sustainable development as the means to satisfy the needs of present generations without compromising the resources of future generations. Sustainability, the Commission argued, includes not only economic and social development, but also a commit ment to the needs of the poor and a recognition of the physical limitations of the earth.

These ideas found their most dramatic forum at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio De Janeiro. This largest-ever meeting of world leaders yielded a statement of principle endorsed by 178 governments.

Today, worries about sustainability resonate closer and closer to home.

“I think people are starting to wake up and say, ‘My quality of life is going down,’” says David Brower, research professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning. “That includes things like environmental degradation, congestion, poorly designed cities, and a lack of human dignity.”

As its definition has broadened to embrace ecology, economy, and equity, sustainable development seems to include more than it excludes.

Across campus, Brower says, questions of sustainability are showing up everywhere, connecting disciplines in new ways. This article offers a brief tour of Carolina’s work in sustainable development, at home and abroad.

Sustainability is not just an issue for developing nations, according to Frances Lynn, director of the UNC-CH Environmental Resource Program in the School of Public Health.

With funding from the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, the ERP in 1992 launched a five-year program to evaluate and promote sustainable development in North Carolina. The ERP put together a series of regional workshops and a two-day conference drawing 200 North Carolinians from nonprofit groups, government, and private companies. ERP has also compiled a case book of “sustainable” organizations and has published a set of indicators for assessing how “sustainable” the state is.

“People have a hard time if you present an overarching vision,” Lynn says. “You have to show them how they can move forward in concrete steps.”

One example from the casebook is a Danish corporation whose North American subsidiary is in Franklinton, N.C. Novo Nordisk BioChem, Inc., produces an enzyme that cuts the use of chlorine by 30 percent in the pulp and paper industry. The company also reuses production wastes by treating them with lime and heat and offering them to local farmers as fertilizer.

“Products that support sustainable development will be in demand,” says CEO Mads Øvlisen, in the ERP casebook. “I see no alternatives.”

Gina Sanguinetti, a second-year master’s student in environmental science, assisted in organizing the conference. She says the ERP’s conference allowed North Carolina leaders to come up with a set of sustainable development principles specific to the state.

“Companies are aware that the people, the consumers, want things that are environmentally friendly,” Sanguinetti says. “And for their own public image, they are anxious to tap into that.”

 India

With some help from Carolina faculty members and graduate students, women in India are solving problems in the home, workplace, and community.

Helzi Noponen left for India 15 years ago as a master’s student at the University of California at Berkeley. Now, as an assistant professor in UNC-CH’s Department of City and Regional Planning, she is helping her graduate students make their own journey to the subcontinent to engage women’s groups in sustainable development.

Noponen has a special interest in the women of India, especially those in what she calls the “informal economy.” In this sector, women are engaged in a variety of small-scale enterprises such as stitching garments, rolling cigarettes, taking in laundry, gathering scrap paper to sell to paper vendors, and building kites.

To help women establish credit for their microenterprises, Noponen works with the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in India, whose members are very poor women workers, the most disenfranchised in society. The SEWA bank offers low-interest loans for groups of women, helping them establish credit.

“The self-help group philosophy makes it possible,” Noponen says. “You reach greater numbers of women at lower cost, and you are also building capacities in the women themselves. You are assisting them not only to pool resources for mutual benefit, but also to collectively address other problems in the home, workplace, and community.”

With a five-year grant from the Ford Foundation in New Delhi, Noponen is studying how SEWA’s assistance with credit, cooperatives, and labor issues has affected 300 of the members over time. Her studies with Paula Kantor, a doctoral student in the Department of City and Regional Planning, have found that members who took low-cost loans from SEWA Bank had fewer stresses.

Noponen is also using pictorial diaries to help evaluate SEWA’s credit programs. Since most of the women lack literacy and number skills, pictures allow them “to keep track of their own change, reflect on it, and act on it,” she says.

Women in Development

Revealing a long-hidden economic potential.

The techniques used by Helzi Noponen help document women’s equity in the society and its economy—key factors in sustainability. The 1995 United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report found that women and girls do two-thirds of the world’s work, earn only ten percent of its income, and own only one percent of its property.

“Investing in women’s capabilities and empowering them to exercise their choices,” the report states, “is not only valuable in itself but is also the surest way to contribute to economic growth and overall development.”

With the same principle in mind, two faculty members in the School of Social Work—Dorothy Gamble, clinical assistant professor, and Marie Weil, professor and director of the Community Social Work Program—collaborated with Noponen to initiate the Women in Sustainable Development Project. The project’s inaugural event—a three-day international forum held May 16-18 with multiple sponsors—drew more than one hundred women and men from Asia, Africa, Latin America, Canada and the southeastern United States.

The project’s plans include an annual international training institute for women leaders and new development workers, which will include UNC-CH graduate students in curriculum development and evaluation.

 Africa

Understanding first, then change.

When one lives in Africa,” Catharine Newbury says, “one becomes aware of how important the relationship of people and land and resources is to daily subsistence.”

Newbury, associate professor of political science, has focused her research on the roots of ethnic strife in Rwanda, on agrarian change and its effects on women in Zaire, and on the politics of democratization in Africa more generally. Issues of development are pertinent to all of these concerns.

She says that many development projects haven’t been successful because they impose outsiders’ assumptions of women’s roles onto an African community. For instance, a program would try to introduce a farming technique to men, but it was the women who primarily worked the fields, Newbury says.

“It was easy to see that very often these projects totally ignored the role of women in production,” she says. “If a person trying to encourage changes does not understand the culture in which he or she is working, there is a good chance of doing more harm than good.”

World relief

Health: the centerpiece of sustainability.

Since its inception in 1979, UNC-CH’s Program for International Training and Health (INTRAH) has been seeking ways to improve health-care practices in some of the world’s most impoverished regions.

The U.S. Agency for International Development awarded INTRAH a $55 million federal contract to continue its service through an expanded program, PRIME, so named because it delivers training and technical assistance to primary healthcare providers.

James Lea, INTRAH program director, says the theme of sustainability runs deep through the programs. Regional professionals staff INTRAH’s offices. They survey existing health care programs, make plans for improved health care delivery and training, and set up a national standard in care.

New Zealand

Will sustainability work in a free-market culture?

Philip Berke, associate professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning, is in the midst of a three-year project sponsored by the New Zealand Foundation for Research, Science, and Technology.

Collaborating with resource planning researchers, Neil Ericksen and Jennifer Dixon from New Zealand, Berke is examining results of the 1991 Resource Management Act, which requires land-use plans with sustainability as a goal.

“In the United States we place great emphasis on regulating economic activities,” Berke says, “but in New Zealand they are interested in limiting government intervention. They are promoting a free market economy, but paying careful attention to assuring that development outcomes are sustainable.”