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I wrote this reflection while facilitation a workshop on sustainable urbanization in Durban last week:

Durban – origin of so many South African movements: John Dube, Inanda, 1920s – early years of the ANC; Albert Luthuli, ANC in the 1950s (won Nobel Prize in 1960); Biko and Black Consciousness in late 1960s; 1973 Durban strikes that triggered the trade union movement; radical white left associated with Rick Turner who was assassinated in 1978; urban social movements of the 1980s; role of Natal Indian Congress in the formation of UDF; homeless federation/shackdwellers international in the 1990s/2000s; Abahlale and the re-emergence of the radical left after 2000; and Groundwell – South Africa’s leading radical environmental grassroots movement. Durban is the epicenter of all this. Why? I don’t think anyone has asked this question. Worth thinking about.

I was invited to make a presentation today in the South African parliament at the public hearings on South Africa’s response to climate change and its so-called “intended nationally determined contribution” for submission at the COP 21 meetings in Paris at the end of the year. So strange seeing the old Apartheid Assembly filled mainly with black people, and all the talk was about how global challenges were affecting South Africa’s very particular challenges. What a far cry from must have been discussed here for decades by white people, mainly men, protecting their own interests. Imagine if they were there today – how little they would have understood!

Download the talk: https://soundcloud.com/user-825958953/parliament22sept15

I delivered this talk to senior management of the Stellenbosch wine company Distel on 28 August 2015, based in turn on initial reflections in a 5 minute talk at the launch of the SI’s Soil, Soul and Society seminar series. I hope to write it up into a essay sometime soon.

Download: https://soundcloud.com/user-825958953/distell-segment-11-sound

Delivered at the International Sustainability Transitions 2015 in Brighton in August, this paper was based on Mphil research by Megan Davies who did this work under my supervision. Raises important issues about how transitions happen and the important role of intermediaries. Download: Davies_Swilling_C4

I have been a member of the Board of the Development Bank of Southern Africa for about a year now. It has been an amazing learning experience, mainly because it has exposed me to the enormous challenge of using large highly regulated institutions with considerable investment capital to drive a transformative developmental process. Many outside these institutions criticize them for being too slow and too narrowly focused on financial flows in technocratically defined bricks and mortar infrastructures without adequately dealing with human development and capacity issues. Many of these criticisms may be correct, but these critics do not always appreciate the limited room for maneuver that is available. On the one hand there is the enormous amount of energy and time that goes into simply running them – human resource development, financial reporting, performance reporting, strategy development, institutional re-organization, stakeholder relations and so on. On the other is the shear brute challenge of turning developmental ideas into fundable projects – what is referred to in the DBSA as “project preparation”. So few are aware of what it really takes to translate a developmental idea by a local government or development agency into a fully-fledge project proposal that can be brought before decision-makers. These processes are fraught with instabilities and delays, while the financial year marches on relentlessly, often resulting in more money available for lending than what can be absorbed by projects in the “pipeline”. One answer, of course, is to enlarge the project preparation team, but the staff required by such a unit are highly skilled and often earn much more in the private sector locally and internationally than what they can earn at the DBSA (which, by the way, pays very good salaries). Then there is the challenge of measuring the developmental impact of projects using indicators that align with the developmental strategy of the DBSA. Indicators so often seem comprehensive, but they are a blunt instrument because highly complex developmental processes need to be reduced into quantifiables that in the end lose the ‘feel’ of the project, often missing what is most important about any developmental project which is all about the ‘human factor’, consciousness and capabilities. All very tricky stuff, giving me a new sense of sympathy for those who do their best every day to make a difference via these large development finance institutions.

Participating today in a webinar organised by the World Academy of Art and Science on the Greek Crisis. Keynote speaker is Zoltan Pogatsa who wrote a great book on the Green Crisis.