Keeping Local Stewardship
a strategy for self-sustainability
More self-sustainability means having more autonomy and less reliance on external funding, expertise or decisions. It means having a larger capacity to choose and negotiate with other initiatives what’s best for your project and what’s not. It means an increasingly equitable participation, which will lead to development models that are more comprehensive and relevant for all, that is, more sustainable. Know more
One strategy used by several development projects to become more self-sustainable is keeping their stewardship local.
Development projects can achieve great benefits when they collaborate with other organizations or when they gain political or financial support. But it is important to recognize that each actor has its own interests, perspectives, and working methods, and these do not always perfectly match the initiative’s and its beneficiaries’ priorities or decision-making processes. As a result, some interventions are not always relevant to what local communities want in order to solve their context’s specific needs.
To solve this problem, many initiatives deploy strategies to ensure that the final control of their interventions remains in the hands of local communities or populations. This is because these projects believe it is only fair that people have a say (and preferably leadership) in their own development, but also because when a project’s stewardship is kept at the local level, resources are sometimes better utilized to bring about more comprehensive solutions that are relevant to everyone involved.
Some of these strategies are the use of legal figures such as trust funds, which guarantee that different actors have a voice in the decision-making processes, or the formation and strengthening of leaders and local stakeholder organizations which may gradually take control of initiatives, etc.
There are many different ways of keeping stewardship local to make a project more self-sustainable. Take a look at how these initiatives have done it!
If you found this self-sustainability strategy useful, perhaps you’d like to have a look at these too: