University of Vaasa - Vaasan yliopisto

As such, the NGO naturally seems the more environmentally and socially sustainable
of the two, if not yet economically. There is little reason to worry about the
sustainability of NGO’s when there are other, more obvious culprits to focus on. On
the other hand, an ideal can be a very double-edged sword: in practise, there are very
few universal truths. Because of this simple fact, the activities and accountability of
the NGO:s are worth a second look.
The purpose of this work is to highlight this issue by presenting a case NGO:
ICRISAT, or The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics –
an internationally approved and highly respected organisation, aimed at reducing
crop and drought-related poverty in the semi-arid tropics (mainly Africa and India).
Their methods are diverse, but a main focus of the organisation is the development of
hardier and more productive strains of plants and crops by genetic modification and
processing.
Two issues arise form this study: the difficulty of assessing the sustainability of
largescale development projects, even when these are done in the in the service of
sustainability – in this case using environmentally untested methods to promote a
larger scale development by relieving poverty. Is ICRISAT really a sustainable
undertaking?
Secondly, the more general problem of finding suitable performance indicators for
organisations that operates on a non-profit, non-production basis. Even those
indicators that are applicable to an NGO as well as to an industrial company, may not
be directly comparable either way; the sustainability performance standards on a
NGO should in many cases be considered different from those on an industrial
producer. What performance indicators would, in fact, be suitable to assess the
development NGO?
By presenting three case examples of ICRISAT’s activities, taken from their own
annual reports, and studying these in the light of contrasting articles, it should be
possible to gain a clearer view of what ICRISAT hopes to achieve, and the methods
it uses to attain its goals. Based on these cases, an attempt will be made to evaluate
ICRISAT’s sustainability on the five scale leap introduced by Ketola (2009). The
poor fit of the industrial sustainability in assessing an NGO is obvious, and in the
final section some ideas for new performance measures will be discussed.
ICRISAT Presented
ICRISAT, or The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics,
is a non-profit, non-political, international organization for science-based agricultural
development, as they themselves put it (ICRISAT 2004b). Their slogan: Science with
a Human Face. On a more practical level, ICRISAT works to improve soil health and
crop productivity in the poorest regions of Africa and India – the dry semi-arid
tropics belt, characterised by desertification and drought. They conduct research on
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