People of Together Possible: Ashley Brooks
In this article, Together Possible steward Ben Riddle interviews Dr. Ashley Brooks, Habitats and Human Wildlife Conflict Lead, Tigers Alive. Brooks story demonstrates the power of adaptive innovation, where an idea from one sector can lead to breakthrough in another. His story is one of courage, and points to the importance of taking risks in spite of uncertainty to turn the impossible into solutions that will help save lives and protect the species that call our planet home.
BR: Thanks for taking the time to speak with me, Ashley. Let’s start with your story. How did you first engage with WWF and begin working with the network?
AB: Over the course of my career, all of my education and work has focused on the environment and conservation. Before working with WWF on the Tigers Alive Initiative, I managed a tree kangaroo conservation program in Papua New Guinea, and before that I worked in Vietnam for a few years supporting landscape management with coordination of different projects that involved protected areas and endemic primate species. After that it was a logical process to move into working at a landscape scale with species that interact with human systems, and WWF was a place for me to do that.
BR: What changes have you sensed within in recent years in regards to the way that we approach problem-solving in the WWF network?
AB: The people in the offices that we support are very dedicated and hard working. While I haven’t noticed any particular cultural shifts or changes in the way they work, these are people who are motivated to get out of bed every morning and work a bit extra because they are driven by passion. We have brilliant people in our national offices and they are working for conservation outcomes in very difficult country contexts marked by a lack of funds for conservation and protection, weak management of protected areas, and conservation as a low tier national priority. These forces undoubtedly work against us, and yet the people on the front lines persist. There are so many great people working within our offices.
I have been with the organisation for almost three years, and it’s hard for me to compare this period to previous moments within the organization. I’ve come in during this period of change, and it’s certainly a great idea. The real test comes when we begin to see how it plays out in practice. In theory, these changes will help empower national offices in some regards, but in other ways there are also risks, particularly on the technical side. There are risks of losing the network of independent specialists with technical expertise, which could become watered down in this process. As a network we have to recognize the potential for negative impact indicators from the field. The forces that work against us, like the marketplace and commodity trade, are powerful and we have to accept that.
BR: It seems that this is a challenge around results-based approaches to assessing the effectiveness of initiatives, particularly those that are working in turbulent contexts. How do you approach measurement and impact assessment in your work?
AB: As we strive for measurable impact, we must acknowledge that we don’t work in a vacuum. We work alongside other NGOs, civil society actors and corporate forces, and they all affect the work that we do. We often celebrate our success for some positive outcome that we can trace back to our efforts. However, when we have negative outcome indicators in certain landscapes we are often too shy of reporting on these out of fear of not receiving funding from donors. In many cases, you cannot attribute failure and the negative indicators directly to our work, since there are a much more complex mix of players working with us in the space.
BR: It seems that we need to create a new way to deal with the negative implications of shifts that are happening at a systems level without penalizing front-line actors for the realities of the situation.
AB: Exactly.
BR: Tell me about the Tigers Alive Initiative, how it emerged and how it has shaped your work and efforts.
AB: The Tigers Alive Initiative (TAI) emerged before I joined WWF, so I’ve entered into an active project space. The question I am exploring is: How do we place wild tigers in a future where there are going to be many more people and much more competition for space? This work demands considerations of human-species coexistence, human-tiger conflict, and protecting the unprotected habitat and corridors for tigers. These are the three core areas that I focus on, which are umbrellas for a whole range of other initiatives that are nested underneath.
BR: Sounds easy, right? You’re becoming a bit of a celebrity in the network for your efforts to adapt insights on how we deal with traffic fatalities to wildlife management. How did this begin, and how on earth did you come up with this idea?
AB: One of the things I was charged with doing is to develop a strategy for human-tiger conflict that we can apply across landscapes. From this charge, I set out to research all of the things that we are already doing to minimize conflict, which ranges from people and livestock being killed, to tigers being killed in retaliation. During this process, I talked to a lot of people working at different parts of the landscape scale. Many people said that it would be impossible to come up with an effective strategy, because you are dealing with wild animals, and people who are desperate for food or otherwise motivated to kill tigers. They said that every conflict scenario is unique, from the forces that precipitate the situation to the environment and dynamic systems where the conflict takes place. I chose to take this impossibility as a challenge, and re-framed it by asking: How might I come up with a strategy that deals with the dynamism and wildness of living systems, and emotions and behavior of those who are affected?
From this point on, I started looking at other sectors for inspiration. I looked at the transportation sector globally and found that traffic fatalities are very similar to the situation that we are dealing with with human-tiger conflict. Every traffic accident is completely unique, and there are often fatalities, which make it emotional. You’re also dealing with very complex, dynamic systems where trucks, trains, pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists, horses and cars are interacting. With this in mind, I researched how the sector addressed the challenge.
In the 1970s, the OECD convened to reframe the strategy for minimising fatalities, due to the fact that there was a measurable, direct correlation between the number of registered vehicles and the number of human fatalities. Since there would be more vehicles and more people in the future, they realized the need to decouple fatalities from the increase in the number of vehicles. The solution that they created was called the Safe System Approach, or the towards-zero approach. All of the OECD countries started to implement this approach after this meeting, and the statistics show that almost immediately after a number of years, the number of fatalities is decoupled from the number of vehicles on the road.
The way they did this was by dividing the transportation system down into its fundamental parts: the vehicle, the driver and the environment. They then came up with nation-specific criteria for determining driver safety. There are really specific things that cut across contexts: the driver can’t be blind or drunk, they have to have a level of training, and so on. The same was done for vehicles: new brakes, new technologies, compulsory speed limits, seat belts, etc. Through this approach, they were able to create country-specific criteria that each relevant department and industry within the country could respond to, and you can see that there was a decoupling of the fatalities from the number of vehicles on the road.
Then I thought, this is exactly the way that we should be approaching human-wildlife conflict, because it is as complex and as emotional. Then I went back to our own conflict system, which can be divided into four parts: the people, assets, habitats and wildlife. When you look at each of these components, we know exactly what is needed across landscapes to ensure the safety of people, assets, habitats and wildlife. From this insight came the Safe System approach to human-wildlife conflict. What we have now is a framework that can be applied to any landscape, where we can focus on any human-species conflict, whether wildlife are damaging crops or killing people, and basically give a report that says: here are the weakest parts of the system, these are the criteria where this system is failing, and here are the kinds of activities that could be implemented in order to meet the criteria. The theory here is that.. We’re only starting to test this now, most comprehensively in Bhutan. What we hope to see is exactly what happened in the transportation sector: a shift in thinking toward safety in each of these parts of the system. Compared with previous wildlife conflict strategies, now we have one single long-term goal, which is to make all of the stakeholders in a landscape safer. Before there was no goal, and small projects were implemented in isolation and responding to symptoms of the problem without a long term vision.
Through this process a baseline emerges that takes into account the safety of people, assets, wildlife and habitat. This will allow us to clearly report to donors and partners our progress towards meeting the baseline. Before now, all we were doing was reporting based on symptoms of the problem. We were doing things like building electric fences where there were none before, and had no way to clearly measure the impacts of these investments on the people, habitats and assets in play. With this new framework, we can develop a clear baseline and set of long-term goals for any landscape, with very simple methods for reporting to donors on the impacts of the initiative. We’re very excited to continue testing this and rolling out the approach in new parts of the world.
BR: This is a case example of adaptive innovation, where something created in one sector even years prior can be tweaked and adapted to another context with far reaching implications, even in some senses greater implications than in the first context that the solution was derived from. From your perspective, how do you effectively adapt a solution across contexts when inspired by an idea in another sector? How do you translate this into another context? What did you do to synthesize insights from the transportation sector, and act on the insights in the context that you’re working in?
AB: It’s hard to know, actually. For me, this all starts by looking for patterns and parallels in other sectors that are similar to the patterns in your sector. When I did this, I started to very quickly realize that almost every other sector is obsessed with safety and reducing risk to human lives and assets. This is true from navigation to aviation and transportation and beyond. I thought it was quite interesting that people in our sector were not focused or obsessed with long-term safety outcomes. I was quite fascinated by this, and realized that there was a huge gap and opportunity in the conservation space that could be filled by adapting this kind of thinking. For me, this was a real light bulb moment.
What also motivated me were all the people who said, “No, you can’t do it,” or “It’s too complex,” and all these other things. In the face of this feedback, I took up the challenge to find a solution. Having worked in this sector for sixteen years with experience on the ground in different places, I started to reach the edge of what’s out there. It became clear that I needed to get out and look to other sectors for inspiration to find other methods and processes that we could copy, replicate or adapt to our situation.
BR: You’re quite the pioneer! As complexity increases, so does our need for solutions and yet we have the same amount of time to find those solutions. In light of this, openness to new ideas, new partners and new approaches becomes a moral imperative, given the challenges that we’re dealing with. As your story shows, these are not challenges driven by a bottom line, but rather challenges driven by questions like, “Do we want to live on this planet anymore?”
AB: Exactly. As we move forward with Tigers Alive, we are coming to terms with complexity by planning for our success and forecasting the potential externalities and systemic implications of our efforts. One of the things that happens in conservation quite often is that we blindly implement programs without actually preparing for the three, four or five possible outcomes from what we are supporting in a given landscape. We never really are prepared for the ripple effects of our actions. Sometimes they are positive, but sometimes we create a situation that makes the problem worse.
For example, we let’s say we develop an alternative livelihoods project that works so well that people are making more money and now have the ability to buy a motorbike or a car. Now it takes them less time to get to the market to sell things, so they have more free time and more resources. Quite often is what we see in this situation, especially in Southeast Asia, when people have more time on their hands they can use this to spend more time in the forest hunting or trapping which is higher than they did previously.
With this in mind, our goal with Tigers Alive is to double the number of tigers by 2022. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that our success will lead to someone else’s tragedy, because more tigers in the wild means that there may be more people killed. As we plan for success in terms of tiger population growth, we must also plan to mitigate and prevent potential tragedies. To do this, we must think in creative and innovative ways because these issues are so complex. Let’s start right now to decouple the rise in the number of tigers from the rise in the number of human deaths.
BR: Going back to your example of the alternative livelihoods project, it seems that we need to equip people with the tools and skills to design solutions that not only work within an economic system, but solutions that take into consideration behavioral economics, human psychology, and the natural systems that we’re working in. Do you find that people in the sector have these skills?
AB: It’s hard to know, because many of our people are working in contexts that are changing quite fast. You might have a well-designed project works for a year but fails the next because of situations outside of our control. We need to skill up in areas of adaptive management and to incorporate flexibility into our design process. I also think that people building solutions are not always thinking for the long-term. For example, if we design a solution that addresses issues of household income but doesn’t address behavior changes that are needed to improve the relationship between people and the habitat surrounding the household, we aren’t thinking about the realities of the situation. If we implement an initiative like this, in five to ten years, people might have a couple of motorbike, a satellite TV and a Land Rover. Quite often, we aren’t thinking about these things as a sector. We often go into a community and press the “pause” button, and then we take our view from what we see from that paused “screen” if you like. What we should be thinking is, let’s also “fast-forward” and think ten to fifteen years ahead and then press “pause” on that vision. We need to be thinking about both present and future realities. For instance, let’s say that we focus on improving household economic opportunities. As this initiative is implemented, how will we take pressure off of the habitats that are now faced with more cars and more people, which now have a disposable income? We need to have this long-term view, and we need to be questioning our assumptions and design ideas against possible futures.
BR: What advice would you give to someone who is stuck on a problem in their work? How might they go about discovering new approaches and breakthrough solutions?
AB: Ha! Well of course, start by thinking outside the box. For me, I read a lot into different sectors. I know that a lot of the people I work with read only environmental publications and watch documentaries about climate change and the environment. By contrast, I don’t always read up on environmental issues but rather explore contemporary history, politics and topics in these sort of fields. I try to expose myself to the issues that people face in the countries that I’m working in by reading up on what has happened in the past and what is going on at present. I would suggest reading outside of your sector as much as possible, and bring in new ideas that way.
BR: What stands out to me about your approach is that you went beyond reading and took a risk by actively testing a new idea. You started by getting out of your field and exploring new ways of working in other sectors, and you thought about ways to combine and adapt these insights to the work you’re doing. Then you developed a “small bet” project that helped you test your assumptions, which helped you prototype a solution that is now being tested in multiple locations, which is incredible. Many people never take a risk because they fear failure, or lack time, the capacity or resources to act. Instead, you chose to push through these walls by saying “you know what, in the face of impossibility I’m going to find a way to do this.” That spirit of courage is what we need in times like these.
AB: You’re right! It really has been like that for me. There has been some opposition in some countries, where people want to wait to see what a solution looks like in practice before they try it. This is changing, though. Recently I have been having conversations with landscape coordinators and people involved with human-wildlife conflict working groups, who want to try this across the network.
BR: This is brilliant. Your story is proof that the cultural shift within the WWF network is already happening all around us. The spirit of “together possible” is being embodied by people like you, and so many others, who are taking risks and trying new things to make progress towards global conservation goals. Now all we need to do now is equip others with what they need to do the same. How can people support your work moving forward?
AB: There’s always a need for fundraising, since we are trying to position ourselves to roll this out around the world. This is a critical moment, where we’re trying to spread the word and build capacity to apply this innovation across landscapes. Because we’re in an emergent phase, we are only just now beginning to demonstrate results. In Bhutan, we are very close to being able to distribute the Bhutanese safe-systems strategy for human-wildlife conflict as a case study that shows donors and others in our network how important and impactful this approach is in practice.
There should be a great deal of support for this, particularly because we’re driving initiatives that fundamentally are tied to issues like food security, poverty alleviation, rural development and alternative livelihoods, which are the community development areas that so many people are interested in funding. People can’t feed themselves if their livestock or crops are damaged, so if we can prove that the Safe System approach works, then we should be able to show how supporting this project can help people protect their crops, support themselves for the year and minimise conflict between humans and species. In this sense, our work is directly tied to development and the pursuit of coexistence.
BR: This has been great, Ashley. Thank you for your time, and thanks for sharing your story.
AB: Thank you! It’s been my pleasure.
To learn more or get involved with the Tigers Alive Initiative and the Safe Systems approach, get in touch with Ashley directly: abrooks@wwfnet.org
