Blockchain for conservation: designing communication assets for WWF
Wildlife Credits is a concept project by Panda Labs, the innovation arm of the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) which currently operates in Namibia, Kenya and Romania. The intention of Wildlife Credits is to facilitate rewards for conservation efforts through a blockchain-based digital platform by paying communities to protect wildlife.
The intention is to reduce distribution costs, allow community agency in defining rewards, establish transparency and eliminate the possibility of misappropriation of funds. The project is currently trialled in Romania, Kenya and Namibia and will potentially be rolled out in additional countries.
Blockchain is a considerably new technology which means that general understanding of how it works and the benefits it brings is fairly low in conservation. So how can we articulate its benefits to internal senior stakeholders as well as participating communities, such as rural farmers?
What would a small-scale farmer in Romania care about blockchain technology? This was the question that guided my process of designing ways to communicate the benefits of blockchain technology.
My role was to find a way of communicating the characteristics and benefits of blockchain technology in a way that is culturally agnostic — meaning that I would develop a methodology that can be scaled up and used across several country locations and can be used and applied by non-technical fieldworkers.
The core assumption was that if people understood the benefits of the technology, they would want to adopt it. But this would have to be done in a non-technical way because of the potential of technological illiteracy, knowledge gaps and scepticism towards foreign technology introduced by an international philanthropic organisation.
I reviewed blockchain industry reports to identify the benefits and applied these to conservation.
The core characteristics of blockchain technology are that it:
▪ Is immutable
▪ Is a decentralized ledger
▪ Can execute smart contracts
This means that blockchain is in principle:
- non-corrupt
- democratic
- trustworthy
- accountable
Read more about this on the Consensys Blockchain Knowledge Base.
According to IBM, these characteristics give blockchain five key benefits:
1. Transparency
2. Security
3. Traceability
4. Efficiency
5. Cost effective
At this stage, these are still quite technical and abstract concepts, particularly for conservation. When working with rural farmers or other communities with little exposure to internet technology, there is the risk of objecting to this technology for currently unknown reasons.
The key to communicating blockchain is to make the technology relatable to an existing local context. There I introduce several internal workshop methods that led teams to draw on past fieldwork experience and local expertise to identify ways of making the technology relatable and express its benefits in locally-relevant terms. This way, the methodology is the same for each country team but the results are culturally-specific. This method acts as preparation to identify past experiences and existing problems around corruption, transparency, governance to avoid the potential of unintended consequences.
As result of our project, the Panda Labs team now has a central point of truth that articulates the characteristics and benefits of blockchain technology which can be used to build empathy and get buy-in from internal stakeholders, including senior management, while also applying a methodology that can be scaled across countries but delivers locally relevant results.
The team also has a methodology to make the technology familiar and accessible on culturally relevant terms. This methodology will be trialled in three countries and if successful, adopted in five additional locations.
