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Moving beyond the dotted line: donor engagement with conservation scienceorganized by Lynn Lohr (Consultative Group on Biological Diversity)A TAXONOMY OF DONORS TO CONSERVATION SCIENCE, POLICY AND IMPLEMENTATION Jack Vanderryn and MARY ROWEN, Bethesda, MD, USA (JV), USAID/EGAT/NRM, Washington, DC, USA (MR), mrowen@usaid.gov Conservation gains support from a complex mosaic of sources, all of which have their own institutional goals and missions. We examine an array of funding institutions and address issues regarding what drives conservation funding and who is funding what. In part, we discuss information on funding priorities for science, policy, and implementation from the approximately 50 donor members of the Consultative Group on Biological Diversity. We also examine conservation funded by governments, bilateral donors, multilateral banks, and NGOs. We examine a broad range of funders and discuss how conservation funding fits into these organizations and their overall programming objectives. For a subset of donors, we discuss trends and changes in funding priorities in recent years. We do not aim to provide a how-to guide for funding, but rather to start off the discussion of conservation funding by presenting the broad range of funding objectives. We hope to provide a clearer understanding of the donor community and the rationale behind funding priorities and practice. MAPPING INVESTMENT IN CONSERVATION: RESULTS FROM A SURVEY OF DONOR PRIORITIES DAVID HULSE, Nick Salafsky, and Daniel Miller, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Chicago, IL, USA (DH, DM), Foundations of Success, Bethesda, MD, USA (NS), dhulse@macfound.org One of SCB’s stated values is that “science should inform policy and management decisions affecting biodiversity.” Clearly this should apply to the investment decisions made by conservation donors. These donors both support the development and implementation of conservation science, and also use it to help inform their own investment strategies. They are thus both suppliers and consumers of conservation science. But most donor staff are not scientists themselves, and thus need input from scientists to inform their work. To enhance this process, we need to know how funders currently use (or do not use) science. To this end, this paper presents results from a survey on science use by the approximately 50 donor members of the Consultative Group on Biological Diversity, focusing on the range of conservation science activities supported, how they use science to set funding priorities, and how scientific information is disseminated within and across their organizations to foster learning. These results should form the basis for enhanced dialogue between scientists and funders about how to best develop and use conservation science. HOW CAN AND DOES CONSERVATION SCIENCE INFORM FOUNDATION PROGRAM STRATEGIES? ERIKA ZAVALETA, Daniel Miller, and Gary Tabor, The Christensen Fund, Palo Alto, CA, USA (EZ), The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Chicago, IL, USA (DM). Wilburforce Foundation, Bozeman, MT, USA (GT), erika@christensenfund.org A common challenge facing conservation funders and their grantees is that conservation need always exceeds available resources. Increasingly, foundations employ conservation science to provide program direction and set funding priorities, with the underlying assumption that science will increase their effectiveness. We highlight modes of conservation science use within three foundations with distinct missions and analyze these in light of results from a recent donor survey conducted by the 50-member Consultative Group on Biological Diversity. We discuss how funders use, communicate, and evaluate conservation science, how they interact with the scientific community, and what limits their use of science. The full diversity of strategies employed by conservation practitioners also exists in the foundation world. However, funders often have to weigh the strengths and limitations of different conservation strategies through their particular organizational missions, cultures and values. Our goal is to foster conversation about how donors can most effectively use conservation science and how conservation scientists can engage with the donor community to enhance application of their science to funding decisions and priorities. FROM RESEARCH TO ACTION: FOUNDATION STRATEGIES FOR FUNDING CONSERVATION SCIENCE THAT IS RELEVANT TO CONSERVATION ACTION Barry Gold and MICHAEL WEBSTER, The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, San Francisco, CA, USA, michael.webster@moore.org As conservation practitioners face increasingly complex issues, salient, credible, and legitimate scientific information has become critical to ensuring sound conservation outcomes. Many foundations directly fund conservation science—ranging from small monitoring and research programs embedded within local to regional conservation initiatives to large scientific research programs—and a suite of projects aimed at connecting science to conservation action. However, to the conservation science community at large, it is not always clear why foundations choose to support specific projects. Using examples from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, we illustrate how funding science fits into larger conservation strategies and how science investments have led to real-world conservation gains. We will put these specific examples into a broader context by comparing the Packard and Moore Foundations’ conservation science investments with those of other foundations involved in environmental grantmaking. Our goal is to foster a conversation about how donors and conservation scientists can effectively work together to answer critical questions and to use this information for conservation gains. | |||||||||||||||||
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