Sean McKaughan chairs the board of Fundación Avina, which focuses on sustainable development through collaborative change processes in Latin America with the aim of large-scale positive impact. He recently published a book that describes this approach: CollaborAction: a practical guide to promoting sustainability. Lack of collaboration is the greatest obstacle to sustainable development and meeting the SDGs, says McKaughan. With Global Goals week upon us, it’s a good time to revisit a conversation we had with him at the Skoll World Forum several years ago.
We tend to talk more about sustainability than sustainable development. How do you get to sustainability in different systems? Sustainable development is the road you take to get there.
We are constantly asking ‘how do you move toward sustainability?’ We measure ourselves by how much we contribute to a more sustainable Latin America. That lens allows us to work with all different sorts of drivers—we work in energy, we work in access to water, we work in urban areas, we work in the Amazon. We’re constantly updating our context analysis to keep abreast of the key challenges and opportunities for Latin America to achieve a more sustainable future and how can we contribute to those change processes.
Business is very important to building sustainable systems—I see that as one of the major challenges of our generation. Because of how fast the economy has grown and how fast the population has grown we’ve started to bump up against these natural planetary limits. We now see that our economic systems, the ones that got us here, must be changed fundamentally to get us to where we want to go.
It’s this generation that will figure out how to do that. How do we change our whole economic system and entire way we approach our day to day lives to permit us to continue living on this planet with the quality of life we need? That’s the global challenge for this generation.
Latin America is a continent blessed with huge natural wealth in terms of water resources, in terms of biodiversity, sunshine, and fertile soil. The population is relatively small compared to that wealth, so here you have a region that could get it right, a region that could be a model showing how to balance the economy, and society and achieve a sustainable future.
Lots of times people think that change happens because you have a good idea or because you elect a certain public official, or change happens because you pass a law. That’s not really the case—you can pass a law but without proper support, it won’t be implemented, and Latin America is filled with laws that never get implemented.
You can elect a politician but discover that politician is stifled by the system and can’t really affect the change that needs to happen. Or you have a great idea that never gets financed so it never gets off the drawing board. For us, the key to change is building collaborative processes that involve a whole host of different players in a trust network. They not only make the change but defend it over time. If the key players are aligned around a common vision, that social capital will contribute in different ways to the change process, and maybe to others as well. Today it may be focused on changing a law, but tomorrow it might be scaling up a good idea, and next year it might be putting the right person in office.
You need this kind of social capital, diverse groups and coalitions of people and organizations to make these changes happen in a very complex context, and for assuring those changes last. At Fundación Avina, we know we can’t make a big impact by ourselves. We focus on building these coalitions of partners, and together it’s amazing the mountains we can move.
I’m a bit of a skeptic on the SDGs. I agree it’s important to set goals, but I think the change process is more important than the goals. I was at a convening of the World Bank years ago and we talked a little bit about the SDGs, especially about the goal for eliminating poverty. My comment at the time was, the world actually achieved the goal of halving poverty for the previous Millennium Development Goals, but how did we do that?
Before we set a new goal, shouldn’t we look closely at how we achieved this last goal? A good part of reducing poverty was due to economic growth in China, so how did China accomplish that? Is that something we can recreate? Do we want to? It is important to set the goal, but it is just as important to ask ‘how are we going to achieve that goal? For example, ‘How do we meet the goal in access to water? What works?’ Let’s figure that out and focus on scaling it up.
I envision a future where our children and grandchildren look back at us and say, ‘I’m glad they made those changes. I wonder why they didn’t make them sooner.’ I hope we are the generation to make the changes future generations will be proud of.
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“Panama city skyline” by mattias811 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
