2.11 Sustainability

There can be four aspects in this case:

• Financial sustainability
• Political sustainability
• Institutional sustainability
• Environmental sustainability

Summary: Explores different dimensions of sustainability, including financial, political, institutional, and environmental sustainability, and strategies for promoting sustainability in project planning and implementation.

Learning Objectives:

1. Understand the concept of sustainability in the context of project planning and implementation.
2. Learn about different dimensions of sustainability, including financial, political, institutional, and environmental sustainability.
3. Recognize strategies for promoting sustainability in project design, implementation, and evaluation.

Financial sustainability refers the ability of a proposal to continue its activities after Project lifetime. In the recent years, most of the grant programmes started to give more importance to having an impact of their programme even after the funded projects are ended. Financial sustainability can be achieved through different ways (Bell etal., 2010).

Your project can receive support from the government, local administration, a private company, a NGO with resources etc.. So, when you are creating your consortium, it may be beneficial to choose partners which can support your project and/or its activities even after the end of the Project.

Another way that you can continue the Project activities may be creating, designing a sustainable structure during the implementation. This structure may include development and sale of a product / service / membership, creation of a social enterprise / initiative, a continuous campaign to collect donations (or establishing a NGO for this matter).

You need to state clearly in your proposal how you are going to finance the core aspects of your Project. So, you can have necessary partners to fund the activities and/or you can create a structure for sustainability in terms of finance. While you are stating the methodology in your proposal, it should be realistic and convincing. If you are going to take a support from a partner or one of your stakeholders outside your consortium, it can be convincing that you made a meeting and reached an agreement. If it is possible you can annex this agreement to your proposal, if not you can state how, when and what kind of resources will be provided by which party.

In the same manner, it is important to elaborate what kind of income structure you will create to maintain funding for the Project activities. You need to provide detail about how you generate, collect and manage funds. The most important aspect here is to be realistic. You can made some comparisons with the similar projects. You can justify the needs that you are going to meet and demand to the services / products that you will generate.

So the main guiding question for the financial sustainability and possible answers are summarized as follows (Bell etal., 2010):

• What will be your main source of income?
• A product / service
• Additional support from other institutions
• Donations
• Membership fees (If you created an NGO, club, GYM, website etc.)

Political sustainability is important to ensure the publicity, public ownership, lobbying, securing funds/resources, reducing bureaucracy for the Project processes and activities. Political sustainability is important both for the implementation and post-implementation. Because it affects other types of sustainability (Scoones, 2016, 297).

In the implementation process, receiving political support can increase the publicity of the Project to relevant public institutions.

You can affect legislation and policy making processes related with your Project topic to achieve a desired goal or facilitate processes in a specific area which you need to address.

You can reduce the bureaucracy in any part of your Project. This will ensure that your activities can be carried out in time and properly.

You may get additional resources to carry out your activities. Public institutions may provide training rooms, office areas, supplies, funds etc.

You may reach your target group more easily and efficiently by using the network and channels.

In order to ensure political sustainability, you can include one or more active policy maker actors as partners. Local administrations can be an optimal choice since it is easy to reach them. Central government organizations can be challanging. However, if you or your partners have a network or connection with the central government organizations, you can increase your projects’ impact substantially. In that manner, you can also take an important NGO or lobbying/think-tank institutions as partners to establish a connection with the central government body related with your Project topic.

Another way to reach / affect the policy makers, public institutions in the area is to conduct dissemination, visibility, valorization, promotion activities. These can be listed as contact making seminars, workshops, networking events, conferences, focus meetings, establishing connections with the head of the relevant institution (Smucker, 2005). Official letters with information documents can be another way to reach the institutions via official channels. Since the public institutions should provide an answer to your letters, it would create an opportunity to introduce and promote the Project. Also, it is possible to reach these institutions via social media or digital platforms, however the chances of success would be significantly lower.

In the end, you need to clearly state in the proposal that the measures you will take to receive the political support and thus ensure the sustainability. You need to incorporate these actions in the relevant parts of the Project proposal. It would be more effective for you to held meetings with the institutions that can provide political sustainability before the submission of the proposal. So you can justify your actions easily. It can be even better if you have an agreement with the policy maker / public institution, so you can annex it to your proposal.

Corporate sustainability refers to the internalization and support of your project by the coordinator, partners and other relevant stakeholders' institutions. It cannot be expected that all employees of the institutions involved in a project will be working on it or have knowledge about it. On the other hand, as a result of visibility, promotion and dissemination activities, it can be ensured that all employees are aware of the project, activities and outputs. This strengthens the sense of corporate ownership and plays an important role in the sustainability of the project.

In addition, your project must match the corporate goals of your institution and your partners. For this reason, it will be expected that not only your target group but also the consortium will own and maintain the outputs you will produce in your project. In your project proposal, it is important to specify which activities and outputs you will continue after the project ends and in what way.

After the end of the project, you can also mention the issues related to updating these outputs and activities to be carried out, which will continue to be used, since you will ensure corporate sustainability. For example, let's say you have developed a training output within the scope of your project. In this case, these trainings will continue to be given by your institution and/or your partners after your project ends. After the project, you can update these training outputs according to your institution's needs and continue to use them. Your partners can carry out a similar process or the consortium can continue to develop these and similar outputs through the network they have established among themselves.

• This sustainability is actually related with your and partner organizations.
• Project outcomes should be in line with your interest. So you can use these outcomes after the Project ends.
• For example, if you created a new training module, your organization can use this after the Project. Therefore, you generate further income for your cause.

Environmental sustainability has become a sought-after issue in almost all grant programs, especially in recent years. The Paris Climate Agreement, the 2030 Climate Target Plan, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and similar policy goals and strategies prioritize combating global warming, climate change and environmental problems. Therefore, it will be expected that your activities and outputs will be in line with these policies and strategies, contribute and/or refer to them in the project call for proposals.

Examples of including environmental sustainability in your activities and outputs can be listed as:

Putting recycling bins in a training or event you will hold,

Informing the participants in terms of environmental sustainability before a training program you will carry out,

The use of electric vehicles in a student exchange activity you will carry out, including other methods with low carbon gas emissions,

Taking care that the materials you use are recyclable or recycled,

Intensive use of digital tools in your visibility, promotion and dissemination efforts and avoidance of paper waste and use as much as possible.