SUSTAINABILITY TRIAD 1:
Participation
The Seven Triads of Sustainability:

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Participation
The Participation Triad covering committment, cooperation and communication
Sustainability is about fostering participation - with dialogue, cooperation and communication.
The Participation Triad has dialogue, cooperation and communication as its three defining corners. The involvement of the community in any activity that affects their life is inherently critical. This has been emphasized time and again in a variety of fora, and is an important element in all stages of project or programme implementation.

For an innovative community effective and comprehensive participation enables exchange of ideas and opinions both among themselves and also from external experts and resource persons, strong interpersonal rapport and sharing of information (communication), that is grounded in mutual respect and shared responsibilities (commitment), and working together towards common and mutual benefit (cooperation).

Participation also includes such issues as solidarity among the community members, value-adding to available knowledge - either within the community or external.

CASE STUDY 1:
EXNORA International is a broad based voluntary, non-governmental organization. It has created wide spread environmental and civic awareness by promoting community/street directly involved in a voluntary effort in waste collection, removal, recycling and keeping their environment clean and green. The local units of EXNORA have made innovations to this scheme by adopting different methods of disposal, recycling, reuse and composting of waste, which reflects initiative and a conscious decision making process. The entire scheme is managed by the residents of each street/community. This sense of involvement and participation in community work gives great satisfaction to all the participants (The primary or golden objective of EXNORA was to generate ideas. As the acronym suggests, these ideas were to be EXcellent NOvel and RAdical (EXNORA), the second objective was to create civic and environmental awareness among the citizens. And finally, EXNORA wanted to provide a service to the public, which would turn these excellent novel and radical ideas into practice).
CASE STUDY 2:
The Bay Area Alliance for Sustainable Development (BAASD), in California, US, consists of around 36 members of the leaders from various stakeholders in the region. It is initiated to create better social and environmental changes in the large region of the Bay Area, members of which are selected to have good geographic and sector balance. The BAASD is currently developing strategic plans called 'Regional Compact' to attain the goal of creating sustainable community. In the process of developing and implementing plans, different local stakeholders, business leaders, government officials, leaders of interest groups or non-profits, get together and exchange information/opinions/priorities for continual productive discussion for environmentally healthy society with social equity and economic viability.
The Seven Triads of Sustainability:

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Contact: Hari Srinivas - hsrinivas@gdrc.org