Institutional sustainability as learning

How organisations and associations can work together over time to develop new norms and practices which enhance the sustainability of development initiatives is an ongoing problem. This article looks at how processes of negotiating shared agendas over the meanings of sustainability, exploring assumptions behind proposed actions, establishing means of accountability and setting up mechanisms for investigating cause and effect in the processes and outcome of development programmes can be a source of action-learning. It is argued that such processes of action-learning can help lead to institutional sustainability.