With mankind on a trajectory towards an untenable situation on a finite planet, a radical acceleration is needed in society’s direction towards sustainability. Instead, progress is slowing. There is a concentration on short-term returns and limited change, with small steps being promoted to the public as much greener than they actually are. A defining component of a profession is to work for the common good. However, Nigerian built environment professionals seem to have been driven into a space in which they are expected to apply their skills with little question or reflection about the risks of ‘business as usual’. If professionals are to act as a positive catalyst and influence on wider society, then their practices and organizations will need to articulate more clearly how their independent protection of the public good will bring benefits. Changes to professional practice and professional organizations must focus on outcomes and long-term issues.

The last decade has seen tremendous maturity in building professionals’ understanding of sustainability. However, sound advice from building professionals is not being sought on how the built environment needs to evolve. Building-related institutions in Nigeria now require their members to respond to the sustainability agenda, but society no longer sees professionals as relevant, or impartial. Instead of seeking expert professional input, many politicians will now turn to successful business people, ideally ones who also have media exposure. On sustainability matters, the media itself is also much more likely to turn to a ‘personality’ or a representative of a pressure group than to a professional.

Governments (Federal, States and Locals) defines the balance between social good and the market, and sets the general framework in which business operates. Unfortunately, the Nigeria government (particularly its civil service) has progressively de-skilled itself and depends on outsourcing to businesses. With a lack of moderation by independent professional expertise, the support and advice obtained by government tends to have implicit bias towards corporate objectives. These objectives necessarily include short-term returns to satisfy institutional shareholders. The longer-term needs of sustainability tend to be squeezed out, and society is short-changed. Fee competition forces small businesses to follow suit. Academe also follows funding streams that use tick-box criteria and ranking systems. Where it engages with industry, short-term objectives predominate. Even well-intentioned initiatives, like government support for innovation in housing refurbishment, are driven by outsourced and largely superficial judgements on what constitutes a worthwhile project.         

A VIEW FROM CHINA

A society rapidly leaving behind one social and business framework, seeking to find an alternative. China’s engagement with capitalism is delivering increasingly uneven distribution of prosperity, from the super-rich to the super-poor. Apparent blind faith in the consumer society and incessant exposure to images of affluence keeps the 1.3 billion population heading in the same direction, with everyone striving for more. Vast sums of money can be created and rapid growth maintained by exploiting human and natural resources, with few safeguards. The guiding traditions of Confucius with its support for the common good, acceptance of one’s place in society and a balance with the natural world have been set aside as vestiges of a past era. Sadly, Western professionals, as handmaidens of the corporations, are reinforcing the illusion that this new model offers a route to various possible utopias.

To hold the social fabric together, China’s government is realizing that it needs a process of defining limits and standards for business. Struggling to control the free market juggernaut, it is formulating rules to moderate the general direction. China’s government has recognized that much corporate Western advice does not benefit society as a whole, and that longer-term sustainability and prosperity will require significant constraints on resource use. Unilaterally, it is likely to greatly tighten constraints on corporate culture.

China’s new 12th Five Year Plan identifies a raft of Green Technology sectors intended to address China’s natural resource limitations. The intention is to guide local industry to develop new green products with an eye to the longer term, coupled with proactive drives to stimulate local demand. One of the 12th Five Year Plan’s stated objectives is to redistribute wealth to those who have yet to benefit; the unwritten text is that this is needed to hold society together and is the one opportunity to achieve reasonable levels of prosperity for all its people. As China watches the West’s current difficulties (financial hardship, a partly paralyzed political system, lack of firm leadership and wider disenchantment with the political process), it is hardly surprising that China wishes to develop its own form of community engagement and sustainable development. This raises a crucial question for the West: is there an alternative to such unilateral action more suited to a democracy and society with individual choices, but that can align longer-term needs with shorter-term gains?

THE PROFESSIONS AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

There are clear parallels between the UK’s Industrial Revolution in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and what China now faces as it grapples with the implication of its own industrialization: big business as the driver for economic growth; large-scale consumption, pollution and exploitation of labour; mass migration; and breakdown of the previous largely rural and almost feudal society. Then the UK mass population harnessed the technology of the time, the printing press, to bypass authority control and voice its concerns, which in turn threatened social stability and prompted major change. For the Chinese people a similar situation presents itself now, while the new technology of today for voicing its concerns is mass micro-blogging, it seeks very similar ends. The main difference is that while the UK’s Industrial Revolution and adoption of an individual’s rights took more than 150 years, it seems likely that China’s will take barely 50 years.

China already recognizes the importance of technical professional advice and its government receives independent advice from professionals and academics. Indeed, this recalls the distant past when technical advisors formed a key part of China’s civil service. The current political elite often has a technical training foundation. This top Beijing leadership repeatedly identifies the better use of finite resources, social development and the development of the professions as key to China’s future prosperity. The present political challenge is to identify the appropriate levers to achieve this in a smooth and manageable way. There is a desire not to make grand claims or gestures for future targets as any inability to achieve these leads directly to cultural dishonor.

This commonality of overall challenges facing a developing industrial nation prompts a consideration of the subtleties of a differing context. In the UK in the 18th and 19th centuries, professional institutions directly emerged in response to the pressures of the Industrial Revolution. At the time, those responsible for society’s governance had little understanding of technical issues, or how to manage high rates of change. They certainly had no similar tradition of a formal civil service with technical advisors. Instead, a centuries-old tradition of craftsmen guilds informed the new roles of independent professions to provide advice on what practices could be used to balance the needs of industry and society. The impartiality of the emerging professionals allowed technical standards and professional judgement to be made available for adoption by government and thereby given enforceable status. The role of the professions as mediators was formalized and embedded in their constitutions.

China is now entering a similar situation as it finds it difficult to use the command-and-control approach alone to affect change in the ways people and businesses do things. The current rapid expansion of education in China has led to a new generation of professionals, with new regimes of registration requirements and training beyond full-time education. Various high-profile incidents (e.g. the high-speed train disaster in July 2011 and numerous fires in high-rise buildings) have highlighted the severe limitations of business providing the shallow commercial technical direction, coupled with weak enforcement abilities of local government. The challenge for this new generation of professionals includes learning how to bridge the gap between businesses and the wider needs of society.

THE GAP

There is a natural gap between social development and prosperity generation. Twentieth-century China demonstrated acutely how social development can stall if the means of generating prosperity are not allowed to develop. Now the situation has changed too far in the other direction, with China grappling to find a new balance.

When the Nigeria went through a similar process two centuries ago, professionals emerged to provide a key connection between social, economic and environmental progress. Now, with decisive action on the environment becoming essential and social development largely stalled, the Nigerian government turns directly to business for solutions and sees professionals as largely irrelevant. There are several reasons why the role of professionals has eroded in the provision of mediation and direction:

• corporations have become dominant and all-pervasive; professionals are now perceived as merely a part of business
• politicians have forgotten why impartial advice is essential to balance social, environmental and business needs
• communications have changed dramatically and now engage a far wider range of stakeholders
• professions and professionals have not developed in response to the above changes

Each of these influences is explored below in more depth.

THE RISE OF THE CORPORATION

Over the past century, corporations have progressed to become multinational vendors that wish to convince the populace that the key to well-being is more consumption. But corporations have a fundamental flaw: they are dominated by short-term financial performance. To achieve short-term returns, every aspect of their business models is squeezed. Moral obligations to the communities from which they originated, or now serve, have long gone.

Corporations actively seek to influence and control institutional frameworks. They seek opportunities to influence policy-makers and government to reinforce their positions. They have clear objectives when it comes to knowledge and technical development, which is vital for keeping ahead of competitors. They seek to nurture, capture and exploit new knowledge, refine processes, capture innovation, and, if need be, suppress things that do not suit their own business objectives. Knowledge and evidence are not seen as belonging to the public domain, but rather for corporations to own and to use as they see fit.

Corporations strive for a friendly and reassuring public image to propagate their dominant positions and so make full use modern communications. The idea that a sustainable economy can use fewer natural resources runs counter to the objective of selling ever more products and services. Corporations and their public relations agencies are continually refining techniques of business image risk management, using layers of ‘greenwash’ to produce an illusion of major progress towards sustainability whilst keeping underlying change to a minimum. Most consumers and politicians simply do not see through it all or, if they do, are not prepared to admit it.

In a landscape defined by large corporations, smaller entities find it increasingly difficult to compete. Gaining access to finance typically means most businesses are drawn into the same short-termism. In marketing, the small compete with corporations, but without the depth of resource. The temptations of greenwash become all consuming.

POLITICIANS AND LEADERSHIP

The current Nigerian political debate appears to frame a dichotomy between environmental sustainability and prosperity. This naïve, short-term view is propagated by politicians’ lack of sufficient knowledge and technical grounding. Having so often started their career as political researchers or as lawyers with the ability to argue, politicians can fail to understand what they are arguing about. Over recent decades, by following a policy of outsourcing, government has also erased direct access to the impartial technical and business expertise it once had within its civil service. One can understand the original logic for some of this: technical departments could be smaller, and it provided choice for ‘intelligent customers’, as envisaged in 1971 in The Rothschild ReportFootnote1 on government research funding – this thinking then crept into many other areas. Now the situation has reached an extreme, with deskilled government customers unable to judge the quality of advice, or to build upon it to promote the public interest.

There is a lack of understanding about the very act of inviting competitive tendering distorting the advice given. A perceived good price may bear no relationship to the quality of the advice procured, and may simply position the procured advisers ready for the next tender. Good impartial advice can often be unpalatable, so it tends to be suppressed in favour of good news and easy short-term gains. Government becomes susceptible to unbalanced corporate influence, while the vision to tackle longer-term challenges is overlooked. Government also seems to think that business efficiency has something unique to offer it in solving complex challenges. In actual fact, corporates will leap at the opportunity to influence policy-makers and government to their own ends, e.g. by lobbying, contributing to party funds, making strategic decisions to subsidize tenders for advisory work, or giving high-level advice direct to government. Typical of this is the advice on reducing ‘red tape’.

Smaller, committed, and knowledgeable organizations and professionals are increasingly marginalized from the discourse, e.g. by procurement rules and framework agreements that favour big business. The current recession has its origins in the 1980s and 1990s when the financial services industry persuaded politicians to get rid of ‘red tape’ and deregulate markets. Politicians responded without understanding the possible downsides, so business had freedom to develop lucrative, short-term financial instruments, but these generated a negative legacy. In spite of this brutal lesson, politicians still turn to corporations for advice on how to regain prosperity. While corporate entities remain driven to increase short-term profits, they do not to provide stable long-term opportunities for a society. Corporations choose the parts of the economy they perceive to be the rapid wealth generators, not the policy options that could help to build robust wide foundations for a sustainable future.

What is really lacking is confidence in a coherent way forward. For many politicians, the ideal policy will be delivered just before their next election, or at least provide a convincing story of glittering prospects. They find it difficult to back things that cannot meet this timescale.

There are alternative ways of giving politicians confidence by drawing on a wider range of stakeholders. The significance of built demonstrations, such as the unrealistic projects was not the carbon saved, but the influence gained. A group of likeminded professionals coalesced and successfully argued that the first-to-market innovation cost was only a temporary barrier. Costs would greatly reduce with mass rollout. Unrealistic projects illustrated a pathway to a practical and achievable solution. Policy-makers have met around the world repeatedly say they were inspired by their visits to unrealistic projects. Seeing the completed development, they realized that radical change was not that difficult, and they could ask their local industries to start delivering to similar standards.

IMPROVING COMMUNICATIONS

Due to the increasing pace of communication and information, politicians are now expected to have instant responses to any question the media raises. If not managed carefully, their messages are misunderstood or too frequently deliberately reinterpreted by vested interests. So, the art of ‘spin’ has reduced statements into a collection of sound bites that have the widest appeal but lack detail in order to minimize scope for misinterpretation or criticism. The best politicians are now perceived to be those who can deliver the instant one-liner directly for media consumption. Consequently, communications often lack any depth. More complex issues are regarded as unsuitable for media consumption. These issues are condensed into ‘opinions’ (too often pronounced upon by those without the time or skills to get to grips with the detail), or alternatively come with vested interests and their own spin.

Conditioned by a media that prizes brevity and simplicity of presentation, wider society is progressively losing the ability to interrogate information for the motivations behind the information sources. It is losing underlying technical understanding and the ability for impartial critique. An inability to evaluate what might be reasonable and acceptable risks is becoming the norm. This shallowness is apparent in many political statements made without considered understanding of the underlying issues or implications.

PROFESSIONS AND PROFESSIONALS

Today’s Nigeria professional institutions were formed as a response to a need for independent advisors empowered to balance the needs of business with the collective good of society for the short- and long-term. When these institutions were first created, the need to communicate with society was relatively straightforward. Professionals were viewed as custodians of technical knowledge and development. They engaged in reasoned debate with other professionals. If a client wanted a service, they approached a designated professional who provided advice, often on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. In comparison with today’s communications, it was an entirely different world.

Over the intervening period the professions have been slow to respond to change. Built environment professionals may understand technology, but are not good at harnessing the mass media and modern communications. Consequently, they are now largely invisible to the current political leadership and to society as a whole. These professionals are not seen as able to contribute to the immediate needs of prosperity generation, environmental sustainability or social development. The media further marginalize professionals by extracting minimal sound bites to justify someone else’s opinion. When they do occasionally try to seek a single, coherent voice from professionals, they too often fail and instead find it easier to turn to a pressure group.

Built environment professionals operate in fragmented institutions, none of which has the ability to provide the rapid, coherent, well-grounded responses that wider society needs to fill the current voids in knowledge or understanding. Their efforts seem to perpetuate the narrow historic institutional pigeonholes and silos. Growing issues for society, such as the human interface with the built environment, simply get sidetracked as a non-core concern. Costs and finance are similarly divorced from the technical, so any balanced integrated environmental/social/economic views cannot be offered. Few of the professional institutions prioritize engagement with wider and more demanding society. Instead, when presented with new challenges, there is a tendency simply to multiply the legions of institutions with another one and thereby increase the silo effects.

Each professional institution tends to have its own narrow view of sustainability, thereby duplicating effort and lacking integration. Individual institutions do prepare some sound and valuable technical publications, but nearly always in isolation of the wider context. Sadly, it is not the professions that provide the leadership with balanced research and reality checks (issues such as heat pump effectiveness, overall building performance, etc.) on what policy-makers and industry vested interest have been advocating, often unwisely. This lack of independent balance has, for example, probably put back development and investment of micro-wind turbines by 20 years. Professionals should have taken the lead in two ways:

• aiding industry to develop a suitable offering
• explaining to policy-makers their appropriateness for particular applications

These are fields where the UK had clear market leads but has lost it because of lack of a balanced view. As for the wider picture of how society can migrate toward consumption consistent with living on a single planet, the institutions are ill-equipped. So, when opportunities do arise to communicate quickly and concisely with media, policy-makers or the public, few if any institutions are ready or prepared to make the right kind of contribution.

DOES TODAY’S SOCIETY NEED PROFESSIONALS?

With politicians struggling to balance short-term profits of corporations with longer-term social good, and the media unable to engage the public in meaningful debate beyond sound bites, there is a place for clear vision about the way forward. Without it, sustainability will continue to be seen as an irreconcilable issue, to be seized by marketing greenwash and subsequently discredited in the eyes of the public. Built environment professionals and their institutions need to understand better the underlying drivers and motivations of the various stakeholders – including politicians, corporations and the media – if they are to respond and help improve society’s engagement in sustainability. As an example, a common theme behind recent actions of all these groups is a focus on the individual – as consumer, voter or influencer.

There are direct parallels on this theme within the work spheres of building professionals. Traditionally these professionals dispensed advice at what might be termed a generic level, often to other professionals and tradesmen, and rarely to individual end users. In spite of decades of case study evidence, only recently have construction professionals begun to realize that their buildings do not work as envisaged. The new realization is the need to understand the individual end user better.

A century ago, a client might have been happy with a building that was structurally stable, had the suitable external imagery and, of lesser importance, provided a room at, say, 12–28°C. This has now evolved to include what influences the productivity and satisfaction of the individual occupant by focusing on the technology inside buildings and how it delivers in operation over time, or simply the ever-rising expectations of individuals. This contrast is very clearly demonstration in the less mature Chinese situation where capital value, as embodied in external imagery and size, currently trumps most design attempts at considering the experience of inhabitants, internal productivity, operational costs or resulting environmental impact.

Building professionals are now starting to be judged critically on the match between our design predictions and actual operational performance. When they do not match, people are no longer content with excuses. Professionals can no longer hide behind statements such as the ‘industry standard methods predicted these energy savings’; nor can they expect politicians and the media to understand that because rebound effects have been disregarded, policy is not delivering the energy savings predicted. As the emphasis on prosperity passes from the simple capital value growth (as seen in current China) to maximizing benefit from the intellects of individuals in the knowledge economy, the goalposts have moved again and professionals must respond.

A NEW PROFESSIONALISM

If building professionals are to make a meaningful contribution in society and to sustainability, they must address two fundamental issues: first, to fill the large communications gap in society’s appreciation of sustainability; and second, to develop reasoned and rounded views about the complex world in which we work. If professionals do not change their ways, they will become even less relevant to society, its leaders and its wealth generators – marginalized from the sustainability debate and unable to formulate the solutions needed.

• A new approach to professionalism is needed. This would entail:
• Being relevant to politicians and the public.
• A single authoritative voice for communication, even when explaining multiple views.
• Compatibility with media and public expectations – communication may entail sound bites, but it needs to be underpinned with in-depth analysis in order to create trust.
• Tailoring the response to a specific audience: to be concise, quick, relevant and balanced in response to topical issues; and to present information in ways that speak directly to different and wider audiences with economic, political, social or environmental standpoints. To understand what level the views and interpretation are needed; policy, strategy and tactics.
• Acting to build confidence across society: the provision of practical and prosperous ways forward will assist politicians, the public and industry.

FOR BUILT ENVIRONMENT PROFESSIONALS TO PROGRESS WITH THIS, THEY WILL NEED:

• A unified arrangement that can pull together all the existing professional institutions.
• A single point of contact for media and the public, not the current fragmentation.
• Independence to take a balanced, long-term view of society’s needs and to be the defender of the inhabitants of the built and natural environment.
• Transparency, so the public can see what gives professionals and their institutions their authority and wisdom.
• A service that is more joined up and cross-discipline aware, including the economic and social side of implementing technical issues. This must draw together all aspects of the sustainability ‘Triple Bottom Line’.

Institution(s) that become the repositories of collective knowledge to benefit everyone, avoiding the gaps, overlaps and misfits that occur today. This must include knowledge of actual performance in operation and feedback for improving design and implementation, as well as data on how public policies actually translate into practice. It will need whistleblower protection, as in the aviation industry. It must avoid the selective knowledge accumulation that vested interests of corporations and government currently promote.

Free public and research access to this knowledge, not kept in professional ivory towers or corporate vaults. The worth of an institution will be in its ability to accumulate knowledge and interpret it for day-to-day use in wider society.

Every professional must be seen to have responsibilities outside their day jobs, required by their institution, to dedicate a mandatory proportion of their time to the common good of society.

The built environment professions should put more effort into becoming key players in formulating policy recommendations, initiating technical standards and regulatory frameworks for the built environment. They should also be seen to have sufficient breadth and relevance to become the first port of call for balancing economic prosperity and social good.

The key questions are whether built environment professionals are ready and willing to engage with these challenges; and whether their institutions can adapt accordingly.

For more information or to explore how CIOB NIGERIA HUB can support your profession and businesses, please contact our team: info@ciobnigeriahub.org or call +2347064420135