Better Climate Funding Means Centering Local and Indigenous Communities

(Photo by Felipe Rodriguez)

Over the past several years, a consensus has formed that addressing the interlinked climate and biodiversity crises requires supporting the land rights and environmental stewardship of Indigenous Peoples and other local, rural communities who live alongside and depend on natural resources for their livelihoods. At least 50 percent of the earth’s land area is owned, used, or managed by Indigenous Peoples and local communities (IPLCs), with 36 percent of all intact forests on recognized Indigenous lands. Twenty-five percent of the entire Amazon Basin is on legally recognized Indigenous Territories, which are generally better protected than even government parks and reserves. Across the globe, Indigenous Territories and other community lands contribute roughly an equivalent land area as all formally protected parks and reserves.

For this reason, when the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) formulated new targets to protect 30 percent of the world’s lands, inland waters, and coastal and marine areas by 2030, they provided unprecedented emphasis on the importance of recognizing and respecting Indigenous and traditional territories, including specific wording on recognizing Indigenous and traditional territories and respecting Indigenous and community land rights. Yet, despite this consensus, the Rainforest Foundation Norway showed, in 2021, that efforts to recognize Indigenous land rights and support their forest conservation were getting less than 1 percent of all climate financing, with the vast majority of funding going to international organizations or development contractors.

There are signs that this is changing. At the 2021 UN climate summit, a group of 17 funders issued a pledge of $1.7 billion to support Indigenous land rights and forest tenure, incorporating some of an earlier “Protecting the Planet” pledge of $5 billion made by another group of funders toward conservation efforts (which also stressed the importance of Indigenous and community-driven practices and conservation models). Public funding agencies, such as the Global Environment Facility and USAID, are also expressing their own intentions to get more climate and biodiversity funding to local, community-level, and Indigenous organizations.

However, as attention grows on the challenge of getting funding to the Indigenous and local groups that can actually bring about change on the ground, progress remains slow: In a review carried out one year after the $1.7 billion pledge in Glasgow, donors reported that only about 7 percent of that funding was going directly to Indigenous communities.

From Pledges to Action

Failure to get funding to local and community organizations is not new. Less than 5 percent of overall international humanitarian funding reaches local organizations, and, for example, research by the Bridgespan Group shows that African organizations get only about 11 percent of all philanthropic funding invested in Africa. Even less support has reached rightsholder women, despite the essential role of women in forest management and their exclusion from many governance structures. The same goes for Afro-descendant groups in Latin America who customarily manage over 145 million hectares of land important for climate and conservation across 16 countries.

There are additional challenges to how the funding that does reach Indigenous and local groups is designed and structured. Even when funding reaches those organizations, the utility and impact is often limited by grantmaking practices that prevent funds from being “fit for purpose” for local groups. Most grants are structured around relatively short-term projects, with limitations on investment in core organizational costs, and often significant transaction costs to both manage and access funding. For example, another recent study on African conservation funding practices finds that 92 percent of African civil society organizations struggle to access sufficient core funding, 71 percent of them identified short-term project structures as a key barrier, and 52 percent find existing proposal and reporting requirements to be a barrier.

Funding practices and grant design need to change in ways that actually enable local groups to access, manage, and benefit from funds more easily and more quickly. All of this ultimately requires major changes in the culture, infrastructure, and practices of climate and conservation funders, including international NGOs, private foundations and philanthropies, and government funding agencies. 

Toward Better Climate and Conservation Funding

Drawing on the findings from recent research efforts and related dialogues over the past year, there are four key priorities for funders and other actors to shift more funding to the point of impact that we would highlight:

1. Improving grantmaking practices

Making funding practices more accessible, responsive, and aligned with the needs and priorities of Indigenous and community organizations begins by acknowledging the huge gulf between the predominant culture of Western philanthropy and the culture and lifeways of Indigenous Peoples. In practical terms, making funding more “fit for purpose” means that grants should be co-designed to provide more long-term, unrestricted, and less “projectized” funding. Funders should also invest in reducing the transaction costs of grants, streamlining reporting and due diligence processes, and changing reporting frameworks to allow reporting and proposals in native languages (include Indigenous knowledge systems and oral vs written reports).

None of this is easy. Funders will need to marshal their creativity in changing funding practices, as well as invest in their own internal management capacity. This might mean changing governing regulations or statutes, but it may also simply mean that donors need to critically assess their compliance requirements, individually and as a whole, for how they create barriers for Indigenous peoples and local actors in accessing the funds. This also entails finding a reasonable “risk sharing” and “risk mitigation” balance between donors and implementers, since failing to get more funding to the point of impact risks undermining the conservation outcomes we all depend on.

These changes are possible for both public and private funders. For example, The Christensen Fund (TCF), a California-based foundation, is one of the leading philanthropies with 90 percent of its grants going directly to Indigenous organizations to support the rights of Indigenous Peoples, including land rights and environmental stewardship. TCF is also now led by Carla Fredericks, the first-ever Indigenous CEO of a private, US-based foundation of its size. TCF aligns its grantmaking with upholding the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, employs staff with long-standing relationships with Indigenous organizations, and prioritizes unrestricted and multi-year grants that better support grantee self-determination.

In Kenya, USAID’s environment program has made significant recent investments in local civil society organizations that are leading the country’s community conservancies movement, such as the Maasai Mara Wildlife Conservancies Association and the Kenya Wildlife Conservancies Association. This aligns with USAID’s new localization agenda, and an express desire “to address development and conservation challenges by shifting decision making, leadership, and priority setting to communities and building the institutional capacity of locally led institutions.” 

2. Better intermediary structures and partnerships

In addition to increasing direct grants, intermediary mechanisms are also needed to increase funding flows at the scale and speed required and given the administrative, legal, and capacity constraints that many public and private funders face. Well-designed intermediaries can serve the purpose of taking on some of the administrative burden of receiving grants (e.g. application and report writing), allowing smaller grassroots groups to focus their energies on on-the-ground priorities. Since many funders, particularly smaller foundations and philanthropies, lack the capacity to make numerous relatively small grants, intermediaries can also play an important role of providing this capacity and thereby enabling funds to reach a broader set of organizations. It is vital that the leadership and self-determination of Indigenous Peoples and local community organizations is maintained in relationships with intermediaries and upheld by intermediary practices.

Ideally, those intermediaries would be created and governed by indigenous associations, such as Nusantara Fund in Indonesia or the Mesoamerican Territorial Fund, which are both recently created funds for channeling funding to Indigenous constituents in those regions. In other cases, intermediaries may be national or international organizations that partner with local communities or organizations, often around specific issues or landscapes, and work to channel and structure funding to accelerate efforts on the ground. For example, the Agroecology Fund supports grassroots organizations in different parts of the world working at the interface of environmental stewardship and food security and sovereignty, pooling funds from over 40 funders so that they can more easily reach these local organizations. Blue Ventures, a marine conservation organization headquartered in the UK, is launching a Frontline Communities Fund which aims to get more core funding to local organizations working on small-scale fisheries and coastal conservation from Southeast Asia to East Africa, based on an existing network of local partner organizations.

A further example is the new Alianza Socioambiental Fondos del Sur (Socio-Environmental Funds of the Global South), a collaboration of funders and intermediaries based in the Global South focused on directing resources to local grassroots organizations. With numerous new pooled funding mechanisms being created to move more funds to local and Indigenous organizations, by a wide range of actors, efforts to align on best practices that make funding fit for purpose across intermediary structures will be critical.

Improving partnerships not only helps shift more and better funding to the local level, but it is also part of wider efforts to rectify power imbalances ingrained in the traditional development model. International organizations in close, respectful, long-term partnerships with local organizations can help to lift local causes and challenges to the international level, providing greater access and opportunities to shift power and resources. Some recent work from the Rights CoLAB, which has explored how the role of the international NGO might be reimagined, provides important ideas on what more effective intermediary structures and relationships could look like. 

3. Addressing “capacity” challenges

Appropriate investments in organizational capacity—including core functions like staffing and infrastructure—can have a lasting impact in strengthening local and grassroots civil society organizations. The Ford Foundation’s $1 billion investment in its BUILD program is one of the most significant examples of integrating such organizational strengthening into grantmaking on a large scale. There are equally impressive examples of Indigenous-led organizational development taking place, such as the Commission Guarani Yvyrupa, an Indigenous organization of the Guarani Ava and Mbya people in Brazil, led by elected Guarani multi-scaled coordination and with a technical team ranging from Indigenous and non-Indigenous lawyers, anthropologists, communicators, and accountants. They have been successfully strengthening their political organization to self-represent and fight for their cultural ancestral rights and traditions while also successfully administrating funds directly.

A perceived lack of “capacity” can no longer be an excuse to withhold funding from local and indigenous organizations. As was clearly stated in the Tapestry Institute’s Guidance for Western Philanthropists, “Money earmarked for Indigenous people that sits in a bank because of worries about Indigenous ‘capacity’ is water sitting in a locked fire hydrant while a city burns down because you’re worried the firefighters can’t handle the job.” More effective approaches to strengthening local groups’ capacity, which recognize that organizational capacity is not equivalent to the ability to manage grants or execute projects, but rather to achieve social and environmental change in their work, are urgently needed in the climate and conservation arena. Meanwhile, funders need to recognize that it is often their capacity that needs to be addressed, starting with addressing those internal practices and norms that prevent them from effectively funding and partnering with local organizations, as a recent commentary from the Brookings Institute notes regarding USAID.

Beyond this practical work of rethinking processes and policies, there have also been increasing calls from Indigenous peoples and local communities for funders to shift their ways of thinking, to unlearn entrenched colonialism, and to be open and transparent about the source of their resources and the implications of this, among other things. A recent report produced by the Tapestry Institute, for example, lays out valuable “First Principles” for relationships between Western collaborators and Indigenous groups from an Indigenous perspective.

4. Accelerating learning around new funding structures

With new commitments being made on an unprecedented scale, and with numerous new local funding mechanisms being established or scaled up, there are critical opportunities for greater peer learning around this remaking of the climate and conservation landscape. In this context, it will be critical to transfer practices and lessons across different groups and geographies within the Indigenous or community land rights field. A range of existing networks spanning Indigenous and community land rights, conservation, and natural resource governance issues create opportunities for facilitating such exchange and learning. New grassroots networks are also being created, such as the Women in Global South Alliance for Tenure and Climate, created in 2022 and comprised of 41 local women’s organizations from Asia, Africa, and Latin America who are collaborating to scale up direct climate finance for Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local community women and girls.

The Time Is Now

The new global focus on Indigenous and community land rights and stewardship has been decades in the making. The commitments of resources urgently need to translate into greater capacity for action on the ground, providing local organizations with the resources they need to sustain and scale their efforts. But while improving funding practices to get more and better funding to local actors is now recognized as a key part of that wider effort, the year ahead will be a critical period in capitalizing on this opportunity through new collaborations, stronger partnerships, learning from the design and implementation of existing and new funding structures, and funder-led improvements to grantmaking practices. 

Acknowledgment: Additional contributions to the article were made by colleagues not included in the co-authorship: Anna Heath and Grace Iara Souza at Synchronicity Earth; and Toerris Jaeger at Rainforest Foundation Norway. We are grateful for their inputs and contributions to the article.

Read more stories by Fred Nelson, Jessica Sweidan, Torbjørn Gjefsen, Bryson Ogden & Solange Bandiaky-Badji.