In Conversation with Alasdair Harris

How do you find an entry point where you approach communities as an organisation to gain initial traction, remaining respectful of local knowledge and without foisting foreign ideas and ideals onto a situation?

Blue Ventures started out as an ecotourism social enterprise and that underlying business remains central to our work in several countries. We take people on long-term educational diving expeditions. Whether in Belize or Timor-Leste, these trips provide local employment, and by introducing dive tourism they can demonstrate a new economic value in an ecosystem that may previously have been undervalued. Crucially, our business also gives us the opportunity to get to know a community because we’re there for the long haul, living and working within and alongside a village. Working this way conveys a degree of access and legitimacy that can be instrumental in starting conversations about what matters to that community, whether it’s meeting unmet demands for essential services like healthcare or education or whether it’s getting a better understanding of the nuances of a particular fishery, or of the trade-offs that the community might face when we start talking about conservation. The relationships that we’ve developed with communities take many years to build, but are based on a concerted emphasis on listening and understanding rather than proposing predesigned ‘solutions’ from the outside. These relationships would not have been possible had it not been for the presence and permanence afforded us by our social enterprise. Being present and invested as well as staying the course are critical for any organisation thinking of supporting ‘community conservation’.

Focusing on this requirement for proximity and permanence with communities has been central to the design of our own strategy for scale. We’re working to scale up our impact without growing our own organisation – recognising that with growth we inevitably become less proximate to the communities we need to serve, and ultimately less effective. So we’re focusing our resources on sharing our experiences and supporting local organisations whose values are aligned with our own. Today we’re providing support to dozens of community-based organisations that have that strong community presence and trust. Our role is purely supportive and facilitating, and increasingly we find that we’re learning from them, following their leadership when it comes to community engagement and collaboration.

What, in your experience, drives the pre-determined approach to community-based conservation that is problematic? How is it that few projects employ this commitment to presence and permanence?

Sadly, many prevalent funding models, particularly those for institutional donors and development agencies, present barriers to effective conservation and often act as an impediment to good practice. There are several key issues with how funding is structured and disbursed that perpetuate a highly dysfunctional funding system. Funds often need to be spent quickly and accounted for in a very onerous way, following strict budgeting rules that rarely allow for adaptive management. Arcane and bureaucratic demands are piled on grantees, many of which are only really realistic for large, heavily resourced contractors who invest in administrative teams strong enough to handle the paperwork, but who are – by their very design – likely to be largely absent from the communities they purportedly serve. Administrative requirements for proficiency in English or international accountancy qualifications inevitably preclude many local groups from accessing the resources needed to deliver conservation work on the ground. The irony is that it is those very groups – communities, community-based organisations, local NGOs – who are best placed to get the work done well, to understand the complexities and nuances of sites, to empower communities and to deliver value for money. And a requirement to spend ludicrous sums of money quickly, and often inappropriately, on projects that have been poorly designed by ill-informed outsiders can erode the goodwill and trust of the communities on whose buy-in effective conservation work depends. While the donor’s initial vision might have been laudable, the manner in which funding is allocated and delivered often ultimately causes far more harm than good to the intended goal of biodiversity conservation, sowing discord rather than community engagement. This is a lamentable feature of our sector that we rarely discuss, but it’s one that we must overcome.