To review CI’s conservation strategies and tactics in the Indo-Pacific region and to set out options for discussion, evaluation and resolution at the Global Teams workshop in
Cairns, February 2008.
Conservation effort across the region is geared to the different social and political regimes that pertain to different countries, as well as land use history and new opportunities for economic development that are emerging. The region covers one High
Biodiversity Wilderness Area, the island of
New Guinea, and five Global Hotspots: most of the Sundaland Hotspot, including
Sumatra, Kalimantan and Java in the west; the Wallacea Hotspot comprising Indonesia between the Sundaland shelf and the island of New Guinea; the East Melanesian Island
Hotspot including the islands off north-east
Papua New Guinea, The Solomon Islands and Vanuatu; the New Caledonia Hotspot and the Polynesia-Micronesia Hotspot. This last, stretching from Palau in the west to
Easter Island in the east and the Hawaiian
Islands in the north to French Polynesia in the south, covers 21.6 million km 2 of the
Pacific Ocean with only 47,000 km 2 of land area (see appendix 1, map of the region).
Conservation action in this region has usually commenced through engagement with local communities and it is clear that this must continue because customary land ownership is common throughout the region.
In Indonesia much deforestation, or conversion of forests into agricultural or agroforestry land uses, has occurred by communities asserting their right over land claimed by governments so while engagement with local level governments is necessary, it does not substitute for engagement with communities. This local level of engagement is something that CI does well and helps distinguish us from the other conservation NGOs operating in the region. There can be very high transaction costs associated with this engagement because of extremely complex social and cultural arrangements and interactions, including spatial cultural patterns which take time to understand, typically a number of years. For example, in Milne Bay Province,
PNG, customary tenure is influenced by a mosaic of matrilineal, patrilineal and chieftainship societal organisation. Rights within communities are held by clans and sub-clans, and although these are not hierarchical, the larger clans usually have greater access and control over land. The amount of rights a clan/sub-clan has relates to a lineage back to the original settlers, or to sub-clans which have attained land through various customary rites such as feasting and exchange. Landowners are the people who make up the clan with lineages across generations, the elders being the custodians for the next generations.
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Given the local complexity and variability, a key to success might be to avoid the tendency for CI to focus on these details, but to instead focus on assisting partner communities to organize themselves coherently, and then deal with these selfassembled management units. Local governance policy and capacity would then become critically important to the long-term success of our work in the region.
Even once we have succeeded in understanding communities and then interesting them in conservation, that engagement alone is insufficient. We have to scale up to the landscape/seascape
(corridor) level. We need to affect the behaviour of people who influence the use of natural resources through policies and management prescriptions, as well as the people who actually use those resources.
This will include engagement at a policy level and in the governance and management of natural resources; i.e., investing in capacity building within CI, investing in both policy development and capacity building with partners, with government agencies, with local NGOs; and developing markets for ecosystem services
(including carbon markets). We need to better integrate these three approaches
(community engagement, policy development and capacity building, and the development of emerging markets) and apply them at the landscape/seascapescale. A sensible way to address this might be to focus on governments that are already pursuing conservation policies and help them achieve their (and our) goals.
Successful positive examples could then be used to convince other governments that conservation friendly policies can be beneficial for a country or region. A good example of such an approach from
Indonesia can be found in the Bird’s Head
Seascape, though of course it is tailored to the Indonesian context and would need to be adapted to local conditions for application elsewhere. Landscape-scale conservation approaches engaging governments and local communities are also being developed in north Sumatra and Aceh, the Mamberamo
Basin and on Fiji, where there is now funding for protection of the Sovi Basin and for linking conservation areas more widely in a corridor across other parts of the island of
Viti Levu. The intention is to do this in the
Milne Bay marine project as well. Currently, we are continuing that project on a much smaller scale, our main limitation today being funding and staffing. Once new grants come in, this work should resume apace.
Significant resources from the Melanesia
CBC are currently spent on smaller projects, for example in the Bauro Highlands of
Makira Island in the Solomons, in PNG at
Lakekamu, Nakanai and the Aroma Coast, and in New Caledonia at Mt. Panié. These projects are worthy in their own right, but are expensive and necessarily long-term. They must show tangible results soon if they are to continue and in any case, need to be scaled up to a wider corridor level in order to move forward. The opportunity to do this building on the Mt Panié project in New
Caledonia has arisen through a developing partnership with the Province Nord administration, but it is more problematic elsewhere.
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1. To what extent should we continue to invest in relatively small local operations versus corridor-scale land and seascapes? Given the outcomes that were agreed for the Melanesia
CBC with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, what degree of flexibility do we have here?
2. What are the advantages and disadvantages with regard to potential funding? In other words, would funding agencies be prepared to support corridor-scale activities or are they more interested in protecting species and habitat?
3. If we focus on corridor-scale conservation activities, where should they be? The most obvious are Bird’s Head Seascape, Mamberamo and Milne Bay, but there are other candidates in
New Caledonia, Fiji and the New Guinea Island headwaters and, no doubt, elsewhere.
4. If we focus on corridor-scale conservation activities, do we have the wherewithal to go it alone or must we seek partnerships with other conservation NGOs and what is it that we would uniquely bring to such partnerships?
5. To what extent do we need to engage NGOs working in related areas such as health, community development and education? Would we better achieve conservation outcomes by spending resources on brokering effective coalitions of all agencies interested in community development in the context of sustainable management of natural resources?
6. We have already invested a great deal of money and effort in some local areas. At what stage, if at all, should we decide that further expenditure is not justified and move on, perhaps allocating resources to more consolidated corridors? If current projects are not progressing satisfactorily, what are the reasons for that? (field resources, political issues, lack of community support etc)
7. How do we effectively monitor progress so that we can track achievements and make the decisions needed in 6 above, especially when so much of this work involves community engagement, which is difficult to monitor?
Invest conservation effort in four ways:

Maintaining / developing our own field operations, requiring close engagement with local communities

Working with government agencies and local NGOs to develop conservation policies and build the capacity needed to carry them out.

Developing markets for ecosystem services (including the current development of carbon markets).

Take a lead in building coalitions of NGOs, including conservation, community development, health, education NGOs and government agencies.
In order to better integrate all four of these approaches an option is to focus on selected geographic locations at corridor scales. This would concentrate our efforts, provide a focus for out limited resources and may assist in the difficult task of monitoring progress. There is probably a trade-off to be made here. On one hand we should become more strategic in our activities and identify up front the places we want to work and the people we want to work with. On the other hand, we must continue to respond to opportunities as they arise, especially with regard to the
‘low hanging fruit’ that ripen from time to time. Of course, we need to do both and the real
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question is how much attention we pay to each. We should be driven by a coherent strategy that looks five years ahead, but be mindful of opportunities that arise along the way.
1. Are the four levels of investment proposed above appropriate? What should be the proportional investment across them (or others as the GT determines)?
2. Which levels of government should be targeted for policy development and capacity building in: Indonesia, PNG & SI, NC, FIJI, other Pacific Islands?
3. Are there protocols for monitoring progress in community engagement and tracking the viability of investments at local scales? Do we need to develop these ourselves?
4. How do we decide when continued investment in unproductive projects is no longer justified? What criteria should we use to assess this?
5. Should we consolidate investment in selected landscapes/seascapes? (supply a list of current landscape/seascape projects). What are the gaps and where else should we be working?
6. If we do target landscapes/seascapes, how do we package them to attract donors?
7. Part nerships with other BINGOs: consortiums, loose alliances, don’t bother?

Indonesia - Pacific region map (displayed)

Program overviews

GBMF outcomes for the Melanesia CBC
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