Complexity Meets Sustainability

This blog post was written by Eric Sarriot of ICF's CEDARS who presented at the recent Breakfast Seminar, "Emergence of Sustainability in a Complex System: Are Lessons From the Health Sector Applicable to Food Security?"

Can sustainability strategies for health system strengthening be applied to food security? We posit that at least some of the lessons we have learned about how health systems actually behave as “systems”—complex adaptive systems—may be relevant to the world of food security and value chain interventions.

ICF’s Center for Design and Research in Sustainable Health and Human Development (CEDARS) is currently struggling with this question as we combine experience across sectors. This morning’s seminar provided an opportunity for dialogue with the Microlinks community.

Development programs in general intervene on specific problems, gaps in performance, and deficits in capacity, and to do so, we need workable plans and log frames. These imply a very rational use of linearity. But when we try to deal with sustainability and the number of actors—‘stakeholders’—at play, it just gets too complicated. Or rather ‘complex’. Efforts to measure sustainability as an attribute of individual programs (measurable by a pre-determined set of predictive indicators) have not had much success—certainly not in the health sector. Our internal discussions suggest that complexity increases rather than decreases when we deal with sustainable food security and the role of value chains.

We start with a different, if not new definition of sustainability, one which focuses on the complex systems we are dealing with. Then, we took a step back to look at some of the ways in which complex adaptive systems behave. In the health sector, we’ve come to see that these behaviors correspond to patterns which we have empirically observed, but that we are not really used to dealing with programmatically.

We looked at the ways in which our approach to sustainability planning and evaluation—the Sustainability Framework—has stumbled into ways to interact with complex systems. (We only wish we could claim that it was entirely intentional!) The Sustainability Framework’s approach seeks to combine learning processes and consistent data use, allowing for information-based decision-making and action, shared accountability, lateral learning and sharing, consistent information and purpose, and multi-level decision-making. We also discussed some of the ways in which the framework has helped provide metrics to answer the ‘question of sustainability,’ and we emphasized the centrality of its process for actors of the local system.

Can elements of this model help value chain efforts better plan for and evaluate the ultimate sustainability of food security of households? If yes, how do we balance results and learning?

Help us answer these questions!