Guidelines

These guidelines may help provide a framework to help achieve sustainability.

The involvement of the community in any activity that affects them is necessary in all stages of project implementation.

• Communication (verbal & non-verbal) - Effectively sharing information, ideas and opinions
• Commitment – An agreement or pledge to do something in the future out of mutual respect and shared responsibilities
• Cooperation - Working together towards common and mutual benefit. Group bonds are enhanced as common interests, objectives, and standards are identified.

Everyday individuals, households and communities make choices that have broad and lasting impact which include issues of ownership, visioning, flexibility, informed consent, community choice, etc.

• Consensus Building - creating collective agreement within the community is important for action
• Awareness Building - facilitating overall understanding of the causes and effects of actions
• Review and Hearings - involving all members of the community to discuss, debate and critically analyze the issues

Works when societal norms and practices enable and encourage communities to take increasingly greater control over their own development, without impinging upon the accepted rights of others which includes issues of impartiality of resource allocation, adaptation of external and internal pressures, responsiveness, representation, information disclosure, etc.

• Transparency – processes, institutions and information are directly accessible to those concerned with them, and enough information is provided to understand and monitor them
• Accountability - capable and responsible members have more authority and responsibility for decision-making, can improve delivery of the community’s aims and objectives, and can improve management of human and financial resources
• Efficiency - the best use of locally available resources to maximize the output achieved

Knowledge and Information lies at the core of a community's ability to become aware, make appropriate decisions, communicate and act. This principle includes issues of learning, formatting and packaging information, targeting, delivery mechanisms, information sharing, technologies, etc.

• Appropriateness - in a form that can be easily understood
• Timeliness – quickly made available to assist in shaping short-, intermediate- or long-term consequences
• Accessibility – all are able to acquire the desired knowledge and information regardless of socio-economic barriers or aptitudes

The setting up of a corrective and preventive action system, as well as a learning environment that makes use of lessons learned and involves all members of the community which includes issues of capacity building, indicators, etc.

• Monitoring and evaluation - checks the progress of a project
• Feedback – community members’ input helps increase efficiency and effectiveness
• Needs Assessment - setting up targets and goals against which progress can be measured and monitored

As goals and processes, lifestyles depend externally on the smooth implementation of the other six triads, but are intrinsically linked to behavior patterns, ethics and value systems of individual community members which includes issues of quality of life, respect, dignity, self-esteem, etc.. The success of Sustain Hawaii will largely depend on choices adopted by the community and the value placed on consumed resources.

• Behavior - integration of being-feeling-thinking, having, doing and interacting
• Values - defined levels of worth or quality (good/bad) based on needs satisfaction (pleasure/pain)
• Ethics - group-defined propositions of appropriate conduct, primarily based upon satisfaction of needs.
  
  An example is our cyclic rule of circumstance and intent:
  
  ...you give what you get what you give...
  
  This rule is the combination of the Golden Rule and social learning theory: "Do unto others as you’d have done unto you" reworded as "you get what you give" and then merged with "Do unto others as you’ve had done unto you" reworded as "you give what you get".