Case study: Applying the social sciences and service design for WWF

Wildlife Credits is a concept project by Panda Labs, the innovation arm of the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF). 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.

A key challenge faced by the teams in Kenya and Romania was the difficulty of actually having communities participate in the design and defining of awards, a challenge related to past negative experiences by the communities with surveillance technology, an inability to promise predetermined outcomes by the conservation agency and mistrust in the community engagement of the big international conservancy.

The main challenge in this context was around ensuring acceptance and adoption of the technology by communities. Early in the project, I identified that it was necessary that the Community Engagement Strategy was built around the need to build trust with communities.

My role was to design a Community Engagement Strategy that was situated in the science of trust. It was part internal training, and part designing community-facing interactions.

During our first conversations, the team was intent on improving communication: the assumption was that if communities understood the benefits of the project better, they would be willing to participate. But hearing more stories from their fieldwork, I challenged this assumption, and suggested that from the perspective of the community, they don’t trust the service — and no matter how well the benefits were framed, the need was to build trust to get community engagement.

To solve this complex problem, I applied the human-centred design process through the double diamond: Discover, Define, Develop, Deliver.

Discover

During the first stage of the project, I met with Project Managers from Romania and Kenya and learned about their experiences during nine months in the field over two 1.5 hour sessions. This is when we identified the core problems, assumptions and challenges they faced and identified the necessary next steps.

Having documented two in-depth focus groups with the team, I conducted a literature review of interdisciplinary research to develop a custom framework of trust that would inform the Service Design.

While the assumption was that transparency and honesty were important in building trust — and they are! — it turned out that familiarity and the proven ability to deliver outcomes were just as important, among other factors.

Define

A synthesis of the 20 articles resulted in four design principles that were subsequently applied in the Community Engagement Strategy.

Develop

From these insights, I introduced several new steps into their existing strategy. These would help build familiarity early, actively involve community members through co-design sessions in shaping the programs and its outcomes, and internal Reflexivity Sessions that would address cultural bias. I introduced eight new steps and five new methods into the service delivery with the intention of building trust.

I introduced reflexive methods to allow teams to systematically document and surface internal biases, assumptions and modes of thinking and implement this at scale across several country locations.

Deliver

The final report was delivered to teams from two country locations, from field staff to Project Managers.

The key learnings are about internal organisational change: shifting the language away from communicating to community, to letting community shape the objectives and goals was a fundamental conceptual shift. This gives communities agency and ensures that co-design is incorporated through tangible methods across service delivery, rather than just being a descriptive ‘trendy’ term in the internal manual. Shifting the language means that the practices also change, which is intended to result in more inclusive actions designed to authentically build trust in a way that is situated in science, and not assumptions.

Three anthropological concepts were particularly helpful to the teams: ethnocentrism, reflexivity and subjectivity. Acknowledging that no action is objective and that just being present ‘in the field’ has consequences meant that teams could think reflexively about their actions (including their language) and think about how communities would perceive them, and avoid making mistakes before they occur.

In addition, thinking about in-group and out-group identity allowed the teams to understand the significance of working with trusted community members and building trust early through culturally appropriate introductions.

The human-centred Service Design approach allowed a visualisation of the Community Engagement Strategy in a way that easily clarified why it was necessary to include what actions at what stages.

The new Community Engagement Strategy will be used to deliver their service across eight countries and the report will be circulated internally to provide additional training of anthropological concepts and fieldwork best practice to other WWF field staff.