Fischer-Kowalski set aside four hours for the fifth meeting of the SIF Steering Committee on July 5, 2006. There was much to discuss. In a brainstorming session a week earlier, she and Singh had prepared a frank assessment of SIF’s project work in the Nicobars for presentation to the group, and it was discouraging.

The hostel project, while successful, was proving unsustainable because of high overhead costs. The cooperative societies were languishing because the Nicobarese did not work. The Tribal Council and NYA were overwhelmed by the demands of government reconstruction projects; they had little time for SIF projects. Account-keeping remained a challenge, and the NYA, now described as being “in a very weak situation” and facing “enormous challenges,” relied overmuch on Rasheed and Ramanujam for help in administrative matters. Most seriously, the NYA still had not obtained a FCRA permit, so it could not receive any more money from SIF;as a result, nearly 18 months into the project, only €72,000 of the €400,000 available had been spent, with disproportionate amounts going to administrative and personnel costs. ^[63]

Yet there was hope and some good reasons to continue. The hostel students were doing remarkably well. The 13 village-level cooperatives could begin operation as soon as interest picked up. Since the exchange visit, the NYA had acquired a rudimentary understanding of modern organizational work. The RECOVER research project was going well. Perhaps more pressingly, the need for sustainable development was greater than ever. As Singh pointed out in a presentation to the Steering Committee on the biophysical impacts of government and NGO interventions, the current level of energy, water, and consumer goods consumption could not possibly be maintained after the withdrawal of aid unless the Nicobarese moved completely to a wage-based economy. ^[64]

Changing direction. As members of the Steering Committee weighed in at the meeting, certain themes and constraints emerged. ^[65] First was accountability. Singh had recommended suspending activities for as long as a year, but Caritas wanted more engagement and more spending. They had donors to satisfy, and Neighbor in Need was looking for results. Altenburg had lost patience with the FCRA delay and wanted it remedied; without a legal money channel to the islands, SIF would soon need to consider returning the funds to the donors. ^[66]

Altenburg was also uncomfortable with the structure of project management in the Nicobars. Caritas was accustomed to having local NGOs manage its projects, and Altenburg felt SIF was now too dependent on Austrian energy and expertise. The beneficiaries were not engaged as they should be. They required more discipline, more competency, more commitment—and more professional oversight. Not another delay, but some sort of fix. ^[67]

Others worried that Singh’s wait-and-see approach would allow “irreversible negative influences” to overrun the region. Even if the Nicobarese themselves were wavering, they argued, SIF should continue to honor what Fischer-Kowalski called the “golden age” of pre-modern culture while preparing the Nicobarese for long-term changes in their way of life. When the aid bubble burst, they argued, SIF should be there to help pick up the pieces.

Haas, the exchange visit facilitator, had a related concern. While the Tribal Council was the traditional Nicobarese governing body, its influence appeared to be waning. Increasingly, village headmen and tsunami captains were organizing and directing local development action, some to their own advantage. If SIF stepped back now, Haas worried, they could find themselves backing the wrong horse down the stretch. ^[68]

The discussants came to agree that the most urgent task was to strengthen the NYA, in particular, its sense of itself as guardian of the old culture, proponent of sustainable development, and competent community activist. As the minutes of the meeting recorded, “the Steering Committee would welcome the development of the NYA as a relatively independent organization that sees itself above all as the spokesman for the local community base.” But how?

Unusual plan. Fischer-Kowalski, it turned out, had a plan, and an unusual one. SIF would, in effect, stage an intervention. As facilitator, it would hire the Society for Promotion of Himalayan Indigenous Activities (SOPHIA), an experienced, FCRA-qualified, Indian NGO that specialized in capacity building, management training and project development for indigenous peoples. SIF would fly a group of Nicobarese leaders 1,600 miles from the islands to the city of Dehradun, capital of the state of Uttarakhand in the Himalayas, for 10 days training with SIF and SOPHIA. They would meet in plenary sessions. They would consult with a legal advisor. They would gain “practical knowledge on how to run an organization” and learn how to define “reasonable working packets.” ^[69]

They would also—and this was most significant—meet with the Van Gujjars, a band of pastoral nomads who had made a sustainable transition to modern life. It was hoped that this offsite, cross-cultural encounter would serve as a consciousness-raising and solidarity-building experience, inspiring a new spirit of self-determination and a new plan of action for the Nicobars. Fischer-Kowalski saw it as a compassionate yet scientific course of action. “They felt so terribly lost,” she says.

They felt really uprooted, and they didn’t have the self-reliance or the basic capacities to do certain things. For example, the bookkeeping just overwhelmed them. They got desperate. I mean, this is people who mostly haven’t been to school. Some of them could write. Some could not. Some of them could calculate. Some could not. The cultural distance between how we wanted them to act and where they had started from was huge . I was fascinated by how it was possible to bridge this distance.

The Steering Committee approved the SOPHIA experiment unanimously, and SIF soon signed a one-year contract with SOPHIA that ran through September 2007. The committee also agreed to continue support for the hostel for one year, but to step away from all economic development projects, including the co-op societies, until such time as a suitable work ethic emerged.