While global efforts to tackle poverty are making progress, conservation isn’t following the same trajectory. The world’s oceans are warming and the abundance of life on earth is dropping at rates unprecedented in human history. Globally, a million plant and animal species are now threatened with extinction putting at risk humanity’s life support systems. All of our futures depend on our ability to devise, test and scale-up conservation models that can turn the tide on this mass extinction episode.
Writing in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Blue Ventures outreach director, Rupert Quinlan, and marine conservation scientist and writer Dr Steve Rocliffe, discuss how Blue Ventures’ grassroots replication strategy is carving a new path in scaling up community-led marine conservation, strengthening local expertise, to deliver marine conservation at scale.
The authors identify a sustained presence within and alongside communities as key to building trust and insight into conservation challenges and potential solutions.
Blue Ventures’ ambition lies in scaling our practical, durable solutions to rebuilding fisheries. Our grassroots replication strategy centres on finding credible community-based organisations which know their context, communities and how to deliver conservation on the water. Blue Ventures directly invests in these community-based organisations to build their capacity and technical expertise. We support them to convene with other like minded organisations to share experience and, where necessary, advocate for national reform.
Blue Ventures’ approach isn’t unusual in the wider international development sector, but it’s less common in the environmental conservation space, where funding markets and constraints encourage the growth of ever larger, centralised multinational NGOs. By working from the grassroots, we’ve built partnerships with over 30 local organisations in five years, enabling us to decouple the growth of our reach and impact from the growth of our own bottom line.
Blue Ventures’ approach isn’t a panacea for all organisations seeking to scale their impact. But having tried a variety of pathways over the past five years, it’s the one that has best aligned with our strategy and values. The grassroots replication strategy delivers change for the long term, through effective and enabled national partners.
Read the article, Why conservation needs a new way to scale, in Stanford Social Innovation Review.
Discover fresh-thinking from our supporters and partner organisations below:
Read Kevin Starr, Director of the Mulago Foundation’s Big Enough. Simple Enough. Cheap Enough. in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, shared on Blue Ventures’ website
Click here to review Five Ways to Advance Conservation Entrepreneurship, by Alasdair Harris and Fred Nelson, of Malisili, in the Stanford Social Innovation Review
Read Conservation 2.0, by Dr Steve Rocliffe, in the Stanford Social Innovation Review
