Priya Bala-Miller: connecting social justice and sustainability
Who are you?
I am a sustainability professional with two decades years of experience in a variety of sectors. I am also a settler who is grateful to live on the on the unceded, ancestral and traditional territory of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the territories of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil- Waututh) Nations. I make this acknowledgement, with a deeply intertwined sense of purpose and place mediated through a differentiated but shared experience of colonialism.
What motivated you to launch Palmyra Partners?
In 2020, I founded Palmyra Partners to build bridges between social justice and sustainability, with a thematic focus on natural resource governance. I felt the need for a more independent and inclusive platform to advance sustainability leadership, and wanted to create my own space to work on these issues after repeated personal frustrations at confronting the “glass-ceiling”. Other motivations for creating Palmyra Partners are rooted in my maternal ancestral village of Idinthakarai, in South India. The palmyra palm tree is indigenous to the area and continues to be widely used for construction, agriculture and holds a deep cultural significance.
Childhood visits to this village are full of memories of my grandmother, who after being widowed, continued to farm rice and coconuts on our ancestral land. In the 80s – the decades of my childhood, India itself was on the fast track to becoming an emerging economy and key to this growth was energy security. Idinthakarai is also woven into that story, as it also happens to be close to the site of a major nuclear power plant. The land for this power plant was acquired from the community in return for jobs, progress and prosperity. However, by the 1990s persistent drought, overfishing and unkept promises of employment at the power plant drained this village of its youth. Many of them, like others across India, searched out economic opportunities abroad. As an educated professional, my mother too made the very difficult decision to leave our urban home town for a more lucrative job abroad that would ease the financial stress she endured as a single parent of three children.
“My family arrived in Dubai on August 1st, 1990. On August 2nd, Saddam Hussain invaded Kuwait, destroying seven hundred oil wells and spilling millions of barrels of oil into the Persian Gulf, much of which washed up on Dubai’s beaches. I was ten at the time, and as I got older, it became increasingly difficult to ignore making the connection that the region’s oil wealth was also wreaking havoc on the environment and society. We saw increased water scarcity, aridity and marine pollution. ”
Camels and fish both with plastic in their guts, while lush golf courses sprung up everywhere. On a social level – story upon story of gross labour rights abuses piled up like bricks – construction workers and domestic workers bearing the brunt of Dubai’s gleaming towers across a skyline that seemed to grow overnight. What my mother shared with these workers was precarious work – the slightest professional mis-step would mean a cancelled visa and deportation at best. Our eventual migration to Canada in 1996, would offer a reprieve from some of these forms of oppression, but not others. Taken together, the themes that were central to four generations of women in my family – land rights, economic migration, displacement, precarious labour, peace and security, gendered access to resources and education and systemic racism had a profound impact on me in terms of my choices to pursue work that ultimately contributes to social justice. In my case, the feminist adage popularized in essays by Carol Hanisch and Audre Lorde, ‘the personal is the political’ rings true.
What was your first job in sustainability and what did you learn?
My first job in sustainability was a paid internship with the United Nations’ Environment Programme’s Division of Technology, Industry and Economics (UNEP-DTIE) in Paris, France, supported through Canada’s Youth Employment Strategy (YES), in collaboration with the Environmental Youth Alliance. I gained first-hand knowledge about the Millennium Development Goals (now SDGs), and youth-led sustainability initiatives while taking on research and policy analysis on a joint UNEP-UNESCO initiative on sustainable lifestyles and sustainable procurement initiatives.
Thoughtful mentors such as Isabella Marras (now Coordinator of the Sustainable UN Facility) and Bas de Leeuw (now Managing Director of the World Resources Forum) made this early-career experience very valuable in assigning meaningful work, encouraging curiosity, according junior staff a genuine degree of professional respect. This is a model of the mentor-mentee relations that I sought to replicate in the later stages of my career.
Though my time at UNEP was relatively brief, it left a lasting impression on me about the scale of sustainability challenges at the global level, and the need for trusted global institutions to facilitate meaningful cooperation and action. I also learned about dramatic power differentials within global environmental negotiations not only across states, but also within key demographic constituencies such as women and youth that prompted an anti-oppression/rights-based lens in my future policy work.
When did you realize that your diversity made you different from your counterparts in the field?
I was very fortunate to have had primarily positive early-to-mid career experiences in the field of sustainability working within the UN system and with global civil society in largely international policy spaces, while based in Europe. In this phase of my career, I was very comfortable in embracing my identity as a South Asian woman of colour with diverse lived experiences, and for the most part, I felt that my expertise and perspective on sustainability issues was valued and rewarded in terms of career progression.
However, in these early days, I also faced a few instances of gender-based discrimination and one instance of sexual harassment from males in senior leadership positions outside the organization I was employed with. I was at times asked to take on tasks outside of my job description that men in comparable roles did not want to do or were simply not approached to do due to regressive gender norms (such as taking minutes or dealing with travel logistics).
“Systemic racism and related glass ceilings have come into sharper relief as I have assumed more senior sustainability roles upon my return to Canada. I believe my understanding of issues that can only be experienced “from the margins” are formative components of my empathetic and human-centred leadership style. They also make me more prone to question status-quo approaches and institutions than counterparts who lack these lived experiences. This orientation is not always recognized as valuable or rewarded. ”
What quote do you most live by and why?
I am a planner. I love lists. As an A-type personality, I like structure, predictability and accountability. When I graduated high school my oldest brother, a Beatles fan, reminded me of the lyric “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans” from John Lennon’s “Beautiful Boy”. It was almost a prescient, and yet gentle encouragement to let go sometimes and just let life happen. This lyric guides my present sustainability work, as I am deepening my knowledge and engagement with transformative practices and principles of emergent design which foreground traits such as adaptability, agility, responsiveness and ambiguity.
This recent praxis turn for me has been valuable in navigating complexity and unknowns in our collective efforts to tackle the systemic changes needed to create a more sustainable world. It also perhaps speaks to my sense of fatigue with overly general “talk shops” in the global sustainability policy landscape that result in beautiful action plans, but very little concrete action. Since the pandemic, we are also surfacing greater needs for more localised, generative, (and therefore perhaps more effective) solutions to systemic sustainability challenges.
What made you realize you should be in the field?
Sustainability is a vast field, and yet across the public sector, private sector and civil society leadership positions, barriers persist in recruiting and retaining sustainability leaders who do not represent or embody hegemonic identities and discourses. As an undergraduate student, I was active in youth advocacy around a variety of human rights issues. Early on, I also gained an appreciation for the nexus between environmental and rights-based social justice movements, and was disheartened at cross-movement silos on campus. I vividly remember attending a conservation-oriented youth club on campus, where I was the only person who was not vegan, had a more “mainstream” appearance and did not wear Birkenstocks. Based on these factors alone, I was othered and silenced by the older, white, male group leader in the discussion on advocacy priorities. Needless to say I never went back. I did not look and sound the part of a West-coast Canadian environmentalist and my “otherness” did not make me feel welcome in that youth space. This experience only deepened my commitment to find more inclusive spaces for BIPOC youth to engage on issues of social justice on campus and beyond, and in general these spaces were more focused on rights-based frameworks. This formative moment also motivated me to find my voice on sustainability issues, and to use it, even from the margins. On this issue, I’ve also come to have a deeper reckoning with how white adjacency in social justice, environmentalism and conservation movements have undermined Black and Indigenous voices. My present work also makes efforts to dismantle these historical patterns where possible, including within myself. Recent writing by Jedediah Purdy, Carolyn Finney and Drew Lanham on these dynamics in the context of the United States have deeply resonated with me.
Why do you think diversity in sustainability is important?
Most sustainability folk are well-rehearsed in the business case for diversity. We know more diverse boards perform better. We know more diverse teams are more likely to innovate. Such teams are more likely to be needs-responsive and less likely to fall into decision-making traps such as “groupthink”. For all these reasons and many more, diversity in sustainability is important.
As a community of practice, where we are failing to move the needle is meaningful inclusion and a more nuanced understanding of how intersectionality affects equality of opportunity for sustainability leadership. In my view, the corporate and public sectors are at an advantage over smaller, less well-funded civil society and non-profit organizations vis-a-vis well-resourced HR departments that can take data-driven and evidence-based approaches to tackling systemic barriers for meaningful inclusion. From this lens that some public institutions and firms continue to lag way behind on performance when it comes to diversity and inclusion is staggering.
Despite aspirational commitments to the contrary, such organizations are reluctant to engage with the power shifts involved in creating a more diverse workforce. Civil society and non-profits with limited diversity in leadership structures, and who are facing resource scarcity are likely finding it hardest to innovate and change to meet the demands of meaningful inclusion. Given the role that civil society plays in demanding corporate and state-based accountability for sustainability commitments, this situation also means that BIPOC-led organizations are competing for scarce resources and shoulder a heavier burden in diversifying the sustainability landscape. Ultimately, getting to the high-bar of inclusion will involve a more authentic discussion on power and how it is leveraged, as well as deep transformative shifts that are needed at the individual, organizational, cultural and systemic levels.
What advice would you give to students that want to get into this field?
The number one question I get asked from students is what graduate program they should pursue. I often respond with an invitation for careful introspection about that clarity of purpose in pursuing grad school.
For some of it is about wanting a toolset that will better equip them to be social justice warriors, for others a route to financial stability or hiding out the uncertainty of a pandemic, and yet others may be facing unrelenting parental pressures. I don’t think any of those drivers are more laudable than any other. But, I will say that having a clarity of purpose on why one is going to grad school is ground zero, and then there is an encouragement to bring their whole self to exploring that decision.
Will grad school leave you a better person emotionally, financially, socially, culturally? Weigh up these possibilities holistically because a narrow focus on career and money may not enough to build up resilience for what lies ahead in the world of work, especially for BIPOC folk who will have to confront largely unsupportive institutional climates as the norm.
I also encourage my peers and mentees to bring their whole selves to work – are you a brother, a sister, a parent, a rock climber, an artist, a sommelier? We are much more than our job functions and our job titles, I think this is the future of the world of work – a more humane and human centred one, rather than where people are viewed simply as a form of productive capital. From this lens, I also encourage students to try to find supportive communities of practice that are more aligned with their values when seeking out work and professional development opportunities.
Sustainability-engaged youth today are already leading. What those of us a little further along in the journey can do is to support the deepening of their praxis that comes as the result of experience, to listen more authentically, and also - to know when to get out of the way.
Learn more about Palmyra Partners.