How to Directly Fund Indigenously-led Ocean Conservation — The Moonjelly Building Block Approach
Moonjelly Is Creating a New Impact Economy for Nature
By Linwood Pendleton, Teina Rongo, Jackie Rongo, Bryce Groark, and Hans Henrik Heming
The ocean is our planet’s lifeblood. It regulates our climate, supplies half of our oxygen, and provides sustenance to billions. Yet, our ocean is under serious threat — from overfishing, pollution, habitat loss, and much more — diminishing its health, resilience and productivity.
Historically, those with the deepest knowledge of ocean care — local and Indigenous communities — have been sidelined. Their millennia-old, time-tested traditional practices of environmental management have been suppressed. At the same time, 80% of the world’s biodiversity is found in territories protected, owned, or occupied by Indigenous Peoples (1), encompassing vast coastal and oceanic expanses.
Fortunately, more and more Indigenous and local communities around the world are being given formal authority to manage and care for coastal and ocean areas. Yet these communities often lack the financial and technical resources needed to fully leverage traditional knowledge and modern science to guide this management.
Challenges Faced by Indigenous Ocean Conservation
- Many local and Indigenous communities lack the basic resources they need to manage coastal and ocean areas. Still, only 7% of the global funds promised for biodiversity action are going directly to Indigenous communities and little of that goes to knowledge and science (2).
- Standard funding mechanisms don’t give Indigenous and local communities the autonomy and flexibility they need to adapt traditional approaches to a changing world.
- Traditional funding often is focused on innovation or proof of concept actions; sustainable funding for more traditional, but essential long-term conservation action is difficult to find.
- Traditional knowledge holders often have been prohibited from collecting important ecological information — frequently gleaned through hunting, fishing, and observational activities.
- Established ways of funding conservation do not work well for local and Indigenous conservation groups. Grant writing processes are complicated, time consuming, and have a low probability of success. Verification procedures are burdensome, taking time away from their impactful work.
- It is especially difficult to fund Indigenous science and knowledge collection. Due to a lack of capacity and funding, there are not enough Indigenous people with formal scientific training who could take advantage of recent advances in ocean monitoring and conservation science and braid those techniques with traditional knowledge; those who are trained are rarely able to find work in their local communities.
Simplify and Build Trust
Moonjelly, a US 501(c)(3), envisions a world where every Indigenous and local coastal community has access to both traditional and contemporary ocean knowledge. Our mission is to fund, bolster, and replicate the proven successful conservation actions of Indigenous and local communities, especially ocean knowledge holders and scientists. One such organization, and an early partner of Moonjelly, is Kōrero O Te ‘Ōrau (KO) — an Indigenous Māori conservation and cultural organization based in the Cook Islands.
Working together, Moonjelly and KO have co-designed a new form of conservation finance; one where we build long-term relationships with trusted Indigenous partners and local communities, simplify and speed up the funding process, and work with these partners to scale their knowledge and impact through a Moonjelly Pay-it-Forward (PiF) approach of peer-to-peer mentoring and governance (more on PiF in our next article).
Building Blocks of Conservation Impact
The approach that Moonjelly and KO have developed represents a simplified funding mechanism that better meets the needs of Indigenous knowledge holders and local communities; one that greatly reduces the burden of grant application, verification, and reporting compared to more traditional approaches. We do this by focusing on knowledge collection and traditional activities that have already been shown to be locally impactful (as opposed to untested or innovative approaches) and have widespread applicability over space and time. We call these fundable actions “Moonjelly Building Blocks of Conservation Impact.”
To build our first building blocks, Moonjelly and KO decided to focus on KO’s efforts to build a new generation of Indigenous environmental leaders in the Cook Islands. These young leaders — called the Tauira (literally, a school of juvenile fish) — are trained in traditional methods of agriculture and fishing, and coastal restoration; certified as SCUBA divers; and schooled in basic ecosystem science and management from the mountain to the reefs and beyond. All Tauira are also educated in traditional Polynesia voyaging practices, with experience on the traditional Māori vaka, Marumaru Atua. These activities that go into creating this new generation of Tauira, are part of a program called ‘Ātui’anga ki te Tango (AKTT), which translates to “connecting to the foundation,”and that foundation is the natural environment and culture.
The AKTT program is complex, holistic, dynamic, and braided into cultural, religious and social processes. As a result, it is often difficult to convey to funders how they might fund parts of the program, how this funding could grow over time, and how the AKTT approach could scale to other communities.
To overcome this challenge, we co-designed a set of simplified, repeated and repeatable units of action that would form the core units of our Building Blocks of Conservation Impact. Each Building Block represents a discrete activity, even though it is an integral part of the larger AKTT approach. It is often the case that multiple Building Blocks are needed to support the program. This could be one type of Building Block implemented across many watersheds (e.g. traditional agriculture) or reefs (i.e., crown of thorns removal), several types of Building Blocks implemented simultaneously (e.g. a two week holiday camp experience), or a series of Building Blocks implemented in the same place, but over time (e.g. traditional monitoring).
By breaking these activities into discrete Building Blocks, funders that do not know KO can start small — with just a few building blocks — and grow their investment over time as they build trust together. Because these Building Blocks are repeated and repeatable, KO only needs to describe a Block once. Requests to fund more Building Blocks simply use the original description. Finally, Building Blocks are created only for activities with proven impact (which is captured in the Block’s description). That means funders know the impact they will get and KO does not need to spend time verifying their work repeatedly, but instead can focus on creating more impact and giving important updates along the way on their own terms.
In the end, it is KO’s hope that these Building Blocks will allow these Tauira to have a strong foundation in their environment and culture, with many becoming environmental, community, and even political leaders. It is Moonjelly’s mission to ensure that these Building Blocks unlock the funding to make this a reality.
To help fund and learn more about the work Moonjelly and its partners are doing, please contact bryce@moonjelly.io
