Why Conservation Needs a New Way to Scale

Long-term presence in a community can help build trust, improve cooperation, and increase the likelihood of conservation success. (Photo courtesy of Blue Ventures/Garth Cripps)

For many smaller nonprofits and social enterprises, innovation at scale is the holy grail. We spend countless hours obsessively developing, nurturing, and growing our ideas. We iterate them, refine them, prove some, and disprove others. We learn—later on than we really should—that innovation isn’t everything, that scale matters more. And we dream of going global, unleashing our game-changing solutions far and wide, disrupting markets, creating new value, and moving the needle on the problems we set out to solve.

When it comes to making these dreams a reality in the realm of conservation, conventional wisdom suggests two routes: scaling directly through incremental growth, or scaling indirectly through replication and partnership, ideally with a big international NGO, or BINGO. But while some social organizations have successfully trod these paths, decades of working in conservation alongside rural communities has shown us that both can be fraught with difficulty—and that a third way is possible.

Why Conservation Needs a Third Way

1. Conservation issues are getting worse, not better. Progress in other fields of global development might not be happening as fast as we’d like, but in many cases, the needle is at least moving in the right direction. On global poverty, for example, living standards are rising faster than ever before, and illiteracy, child labor, and extreme poverty are at record lows.

Not so in conservation. Despite valiant, costly efforts, indicators are pointing the wrong way. This is particularly true in marine conservation, our area of work. The ocean has never been more threatened. Overfishing, climate change, pollution, and habitat loss continue to take a great toll on ocean health, jeopardizing vital fish stocks and the lives and livelihoods of the billions who depend on them.

2. Conservation funding and power are too centralized. For too long, market forces have compelled international conservation NGOs (and we include ourselves here) to consolidate power rather than democratize it. BINGOs are particularly adept at securing conservation dollars: Just 1 percent of official aid goes directly to local organizations in the Global South, while 85 percent goes to BINGOs. This stranglehold on donor funding has unintentionally constrained the evolution and development of the field—suppressing the growth of national organizations, stifling innovation, and perpetuating a largely misleading and hubristic narrative of impact and performance that rarely reflects the situation on the ground.

3. Not enough organizations commit to a sustained field presence. Sporadic field visits and occasional community workshops or meetings have value, but they’re no substitute for a sustained field presence. Continuous participation in a community builds trust, makes the constraints and challenges the community faces clear, better positions conservation organizations to respond to emerging issues, and ultimately helps secure community support for conservation. And unfortunately, not enough NGOs do it.

The Snow Leopard Trust, which aims to protect the endangered snow leopard and its habitat across five countries, originally designed its programs in the mountainous regions of Kyrgyzstan and Mongolia to address poaching, but a lack of field presence at a couple of sites meant that a new threat from mining operations went unrecognized for some time and delayed remedial action. The organization now highlights the importance of placing conservationists within local communities over the long term as one of eight principles for effective conservation practice.

A Different Strategy: Grassroots Replication

Our nonprofit Blue Ventures works with coastal communities to rebuild tropical fisheries. Around a decade ago, we developed an effective innovation for marine conservation involving short-term closures of fishing grounds in Madagascar. This approach has boosted local catches and incomes, and led to communities taking broader and more-ambitious steps toward marine protection, including zoning large areas of ocean under their stewardship.

When we began trying to scale, we naturally saw BINGO partnerships as a win-win. But before long, we learned a painful lesson: High-fidelity replication of conservation interventions is really, really hard. Despite our best efforts, these partnerships led to versions of our model that were missing core components, ignored community needs, and oversimplified complexities. With a few exceptions, our BINGO partners focused less on delivering high-quality replication for communities and more on delivering good-news stories for donors. They benefited, but it was at the expense of the environments and communities we set out to serve.

To be successful, the groups implementing our model needed to commit to putting communities first, the agility to respond quickly to local needs, a full-time presence on the ground, and a long-term commitment to stay there. These were often alien concepts to the 800-pound gorillas of our sector, whose operations tend to be centralized away from communities, and whose projects are pegged to short-term donor-funding cycles. We needed a new way to replicate at scale.

To start, we revisited our first principles, particularly our belief that the basis of effective conservation practice is community leadership. Those best placed to deliver on the ground are not those with the deepest pockets, but those who are already there and who share this belief—community-based organizations and small NGOs.

So we decided to rebuild our replication strategy around them. Today, we track down credible local organizations, support them technically and financially, and bring them together at national levels in networks to advocate for reform. Replication via local partners is not uncommon outside conservation—the leading anti-poverty organization BRAC, for example, took this approach when scaling its education program in rural Bangladesh. But what distinguishes our approach is its focus on small organizations immersed in the communities they serve and a commitment to bring all partners together to create country-wide change.

We call this strategy “grassroots replication,” and we’ve used it to engage more than 30 community-based organizations and local NGOs in new markets over three years, growing our reach from three to 10 countries and reaching 650,000 beneficiaries. We’re working with communities to collect robust data on the changes they’re making to how and where they fish so that we can track impact at local and global scales. The unit cost of replication is dropping, and the growth of our reach is outpacing the growth of our own bottom line. In our more established markets, where our core model is already outperforming traditional government-led initiatives, it’s driving real policy change. We’re seeing high-profile commitments from national leaders to reform fisheries legislation so that it safeguards local interests.

Along the way, we’ve struggled with finding the right partners, moving from implementation to training, and convincing skeptical donors, but the following five strategies have served us well.

1. Identify the Right Partners and Get Out There

Figuring out what you want in a partner is important. We look for partners that have strong local legitimacy, and share our commitment to local human rights and community-led conservation. Our partners include local conservation organizations, social enterprises, and community development charities, and they share attributes that may not score high in an organizational capacity audit but that are fundamental to effectively replicating our model. Each is present, permanent, credible, cost effective, and quick to mobilize.

Tools like hotspot analysis can help narrow things down, but there’s no substitute for getting out there. We use field-based scoping and mapping to uncover potential partners, and we developed an assessment matrix to help guide our searches. This framework evaluates things like organizational values and approach, community presence and relationships, human capital and capacity, commitment to community rights and needs, and broader organizational management and integrity.

2. Get Comfortable With Risk

Conducting a partner search in this way means you’ll likely end up with candidate organizations that have low administrative capacity and are running on fumes. They might not be a formal legal entity or speak the same language as you. You’ll need to get creative with your due diligence and maybe focus early efforts on capacity building to reduce risk. For example, we’re collaborating with Maliasili, a nonprofit that supports the development of African civil society organizations, on a structured leadership training program. The program aims to help leaders of East African marine conservation organizations build stronger teams, develop focused strategies, implement effective management systems, and drive the local conservation agenda.

It’s also worth remembering that rather than selling your model to a small number of large organizations to replicate it at scale, you’ll be paying large numbers of small partners (on whom you can’t do conventional due diligence) to replicate.

3. Customize and Champion

That operations manual you spent ages creating will get you so far, but customization is king. Every partner is unique, and you’ll need to adapt every tool, process, diagnosis, and intervention for them and them alone. Start the process by getting a senior leader out in the field, and listen. It’s almost certain your partner won’t need exactly what you think they do. Plus, it’s a partnership—the learning needs to go both ways. For example, we’re building a website for Indonesian partner Forkani, and helping a Comoros-based partner with funding proposals. Meanwhile, Tanzanian partner Mwambao has taught us a new model for village savings schemes, which allows communities to invest the benefits they receive following fisheries closures in local projects.

For us, getting support right means:

• Providing a simple, blueprint work plan that partners can adapt
• Embedding a comprehensively trained staff member, preferably a national of the country where your partner works, within the partner organization
• Keeping any financial support unrestricted
• Not underestimating the time and resources involved in transitioning your own organization from implementer to trainer and supporter
• Anchoring the process in a strong participatory M&E framework, with data that’s collected, understood, and interpreted locally, then fed back to communities rapidly and regularly
• Ensuring that brand-building is part of our support package—wherever appropriate, we bury our brand and champion our partner’s

4. Bring Partners Together

Your partners may work in different contexts, but they will face similar challenges in replicating your model, and benefit from sharing their experiences, ideas, and solutions with each other. Bring them together in regional or national learning networks, even if that just means a WhatsApp group to start. When they’re more organized and formalized a few years down the line, these networks will be far more likely to get the ear of government than any foreign NGO. Fiji’s LMMA network (FLMMA) and Madagascar’s MIHARI network are great examples of the potential for learning networks to democratize power, and develop recognition as leading civil society voices on conservation and fisheries issues. Fiji’s government recognizes that FLMMA, for example, plays an important role in helping achieve national marine protection targets. The network’s members have established more than 450 areas, covering 1,000 square kilometers, where fishing is prohibited.

Over the past decade, we’ve hosted more than 25 exchanges between fishers from over a dozen countries. They’re a huge amount of work with many pitfalls to navigate, but they’ve sparked conversation, commitment, and collaboration.

5. Understand It’s Not Just About Conservation

When we started out, we were convinced that the secret to success was creating economic incentives: Improve local catches and incomes at the same time, and you have a self-sustaining model for conservation. But there’s more to it than that. At many of our partners’ sites around the world, it’s becoming clear that the social changes our model brings about are as important as the economic and environmental ones.

We’re seeing communities emboldened by their participation in conservation and fisheries management, and gaining confidence and motivation as a result of having data that can help them interpret and communicate the state of their livelihoods. As Kartik Shanker of Dakshin, our Indian partner, puts it:

Community-based monitoring can provide an entry point into the discourse of power, namely the scientific method, and thereby play a critical role in the empowerment of local communities and their engagement in conservation. “Speaking science” thus becomes an enabler like speaking English. It provides access, acknowledgement, and acceptance, all necessary for communities to have a role in managing their resources.

We’re seeing other, broader benefits too: increasing cooperation within and between communities, better governance, and stronger leadership, particularly among women. As our world continues to warm, these advances will help build resilience and strengthen civil society out on the front line.

It’s not right for everyone, but grassroots replication offers an alternative route to impact at scale for conservation organizations willing to take the plunge. It may lack the beguiling simplicity of a branded BINGO-led model, but it’s allowed us to decouple our impact from our size, and achieve scale far more quickly and impactfully than we could have achieved through organic growth alone. This “third way” has proven a better fit for our model, culture, and values than partnering with a big beast. We also believe it’s more sustainable in the long term, because it helps build the institutional capacity, strength, and confidence of dynamic national organizations that will long outlive our modest support.

Read more stories by Steve Rocliffe & Rupert Quinlan.