Nosferatu isn’t the only vampire lurking around: The vampires skulking in the shadows of environmental procurement
It’s pre-modern Eastern Europe. Your small, familial village of roughly 100 members is fervently rubbing garlic on their window sills as the sun sets. Your gluttonous uncle, who drank heavily and ate more than his fair share, died this morning. You suspect he’ll return as a vampire tonight.
As he was in life, so in death. At this specific time and place in history, vampires were very real to these village communities. They were those who cared more for themselves rather than the good of the family, and who consumed more than they contributed. Entire villages rallied together to thwart the vampiric threat because, in these communal societies, a problem for one was a problem for all. They were subsistence farmers, meaning they only produced what was needed to survive, with an extremely short growing season.
To be clear, these vampires aren’t the kind we see portrayed on screen today. These people were not afraid that an opulent, charming Dracula would be knocking on their door. Rather, folkloric vampires were family members who rose from the dead to drain resources from their own communities, as they had done in life. These undead sought life force, which was believed to be carried in blood. They skulked around at night and were blamed for common wasting diseases like tuberculosis or anemia.
Life in these villages was all about maintaining a balance after a wave of Dualistic beliefs from Indo-Iran swept the region. Under this philosophy, the best possible outcome is stasis, or a steady equilibrium between ever-present, opposing good and evil forces. This way, life is predictable and relatively safe. A disruption in this precarious balance, like that of a greedy family member, can be detrimental to the health of the entire society.
We have a lot to learn from these people. Believe it or not, core elements of their worldview are relevant to government-funded environmental projects in present-day America. We have a problem with resource-draining vampires too, and are in dire need of ecological stasis. Let’s dive into the interesting, and surprisingly vampiric, world of environmental contracting.
Our government most often uses what’s called the Design-Bid-Build method to pay for environmentally beneficial projects. These are projects like stream habitat restoration for endangered salmon, reforestation, and the creation of new wetlands. What Design-Bid-Build means is that projects get chopped up into tiny pieces, each with their own contractor and bidding processes. The pieces are completed sequentially, such that a new piece begins only after the previous one has been finished.
This is the traditional way our government pays for many project types, not just ecological restoration. We’ve been using it for decades, and even as we’ve made advances in financial and technology tools, we’ve kept this piecemeal process in place. There are project types where this method makes perfect sense, but for time-sensitive, environmentally beneficial ones, it’s problematic.
This approach siphons off project resources like staff time and money, not to mention furthering environmental degradation by delaying the restoration. It is not uncommon for projects to take years before breaking ground, with many spanning over a decade to get to completion. There are high administrative and oversight costs, and since the government pays each contractor for their little piece of the project, money isn’t contingent upon the successful completion of the big picture.
As you can imagine, this contract type can create huge time sinks for the government agencies that have to manage all of these small pieces. For example, project designers may deliver a plan that can’t feasibly be put in the ground, but since the construction crew wasn’t consulted (or even identified), they have to go back to the drawing board and start over. Without clear measures of success that trigger payment, we’re introducing an unnecessary risk of failure. In short, our dollars are getting funneled into projects that can, and sometimes do, fail.
Design-Bid-Build slowly sucks the life force (time and money) out of these projects, just like the folkloric vampire sucks limited resources away from their communities. This system is taking more than its fair share of resources, just like our gluttonous uncle. Thankfully, we can change this. We can stake the proverbial procurement vampires.
Environmentally speaking, we, like the pre-modern Eastern Europeans, are striving for stasis right now. A ‘Net-Zero’ or ‘No Net-Loss’ goal has taken hold in recent years. Simply put, this means that we need to be restoring the planet at a rate that at least matches what we deplete. Even though our community is much larger than a village, we still have limited resources.
While we’re in the process of making big shifts towards renewable energy sources and other long-term efforts like decarbonization, we can make relatively small tweaks to current policy to get closer to this stasis faster. Changes in how we structure our contracts are one such tweak.
A tangible solution to the vampiric qualities of Design-Bid-Build is shifting to a Pay for Success contracting model. Instead of chopping up projects into small pieces, Pay for Success issues the entire project, from design to verification, to one main contractor. They are responsible for detailed project management, securing necessary subcontractors, and seeing that the project is completed. They’re compelled to work quickly and accurately because a large portion of their payment is reserved until after the project is successful and confirmed by a third party.
Switching to Pay for Success drives a stake through the vampire’s heart. The time and money sinks are removed from the process, so more environmental benefits get in the ground faster and with higher performance. More life force makes it into the project instead of bleeding out along the way through inefficiencies. We can have a larger beneficial impact and can work on the short timescale our environmental crises necessitate.
Pay for Success is legal in many states, a handful of which are already using it really effectively. Maryland passed a law that made it crystal clear for state environmental agencies to use these contracts, even appropriating $20 million dollars to carry them out. Others are considering it for upcoming legislative cycles as well.
Making this shift in how we buy environmental benefits is timely. The Trump administration has prioritized streamlining the federal government and promoting efficiency. These principles aren’t inherently bad for the environment – a Pay for Success initiative could be one way that pushing efficiency could have a huge, positive impact on ecological restoration and conservation.
Former President Biden sent billions of dollars into environmental agencies that need to be spent in the next few years through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act. There are talks of freezing these funds, although at the time of this publication, widespread action has not been taken.
Current procurement vampires make those timelines nearly impossible to meet. We’re at risk of losing these dollars that could get us closer to environmental stasis unless we stake the vampires embedded in our current contracting procedures.
Like the vampire who burns up in the sun, I hope that daylighting this procurement issue out of the shadows will aid in its destruction. We have the wooden stakes at the ready. All we have to do is start using them.
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Many thanks to Dr. Jeffrey Holdeman, Professor of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at Indiana University Bloomington for his expertise on the folkloric vampire.