Managing Sustainable Development Programmes: A Learning Approach to Change

Project work, driven by competent project leaders drives positive outcomes. Unfortunately these optimistic initial results are often short-sighted with few evaluations of their long-term impact. The research contained in Managing Sustainable Development Programmes reveals an extraordinary level of failure in the durability of large change programmes and projects in both the private and public sectors. In this book the authors question whether sustainable development be achieved within the framework of large publicly financed programmes. This strong critique of traditional programme implementation overturns much of our current thinking about project delivery and governance. The authors focus instead on sustainable change and development. They show how active ownership and collaboration between different actors and the dynamics of developmental learning can be used to create programmes and projects that contribute to innovation, employment and growth in a way that favours companies, employees, customers and society in a broader sense. The message at its heart is 'don't blame the project leader' but rather look for dynamic possession of projects, joint knowledge management and sharing with external stakeholders that will secure long-term effects.

Göran Brulin is a senior analyst at the Swedish Agency for Economic and Regional Growth. He is also adjunct professor in local and regional innovations at the University of Linköping, at the HELIX Excellence Center. Brulin is responsible for the on-going evaluation and interactive research of the Swedish Regional Structural programmes. Lennart Svensson is a professor in Sociology at the University of Linköping, and a research leader at the HELIX Excellence Center. His research is about local and regional change, project work, learning evaluation, gender equality, workplace learning, and union work. Svensson is the author or co-author of over 30 books. Svensson and Brulin co-authored 'Learning Through On-going Evaluation' (Studentlitteratur 2009).