Project Sustainability

The figure above is a simple illustration of the concepts that surrounds the meaning and practice of sustainable development. Palmer, Cooper and Van (1997) explored the subject of sustainable practice and realised that in a way it has successful gained ground in different fields of life. However they realised that the practice has rather been implemented devoid of the expertise needed. Again others who happen to put it into practice do not necessarily follow procedure and guiding principles to this practice. Most projects that were analysed seem to have taken multiple but different steps which eventually resulted to the attainment of the aim of sustainable practice. According to Halvorssen (1988) sustainable development is "the development which meets the need of the present, without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs". It can be deduced from this definition that sustainable practice has so much in common with the environmental structure in question. In other words the environment appears to be the only container with the ability to accommodate the major tools whiles embedding sustainable practice. The foundation that makes up sustainable development is logical as it considers a situation, also identifies the tools that will be used to promote the practice within the environment and finally it considers the expected result of such practice (Redclift, 1992; Palmer, Cooper and Van, (1997, p.88). Sustainability is a system that ensures that a project is able to personally withstand problems when they spring up. This school is of the view that problems are unavoidable, however projects should be built considering possible problems and ways of providing solutions that would negotiate the faith of such projects (Seifritz, 1996).

The practice of sustainability is one that tries to get the vote of the people within an environment through the use of legal procedures. In other words sustainable development is able to achieve its aims in the project environment by developing rules and regulations that in turn act as track for the stakeholders to walk upon. Alternatively this practice may be ineffective depending on the kind of environment and society in which it is being carried out (Maria 2002). For example: In a third world environment where it is part of their social behaviour not to follow the rules and regulations that have been placed down by the government. It would be absolutely difficult to embed sustainable practice into such an environment. This study suggests that unless the researcher is able to explore other tools different from policies and procedures; this view would be a major criticism to the practice of sustainability.

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