The Wrong Path To Conservation

Back in October of 2006, I was in Alotau, Papua New Guinea, trying to salvage the pieces of a conservation project that we were then participating in with Conservation International. It was a tremendously sad visit to a country I very much love, since a significant investment of time, money, and passion in helping to build a network of marine protected areas was self-imploding. In the eyes of most participants on the ground, the blame rested squarely on the project management led by Conservation International. But I wasn't there to cast blame. I was there to find a way to make coral reef conservation happen despite the dysfunction.

While CORAL couldn't find sufficient funding to re-stitch all the work that Conservation International had started in PNG (it was a truly massive project that planned to create and manage an interconnected network of marine protected areas throughout Milne Bay), we re-prioritized our approach and relaunched in a different region of the country, Madang Lagoon, where a small NGO with significantly less financial resources than CI could still have a positive impact on biodiversity conservation.

But the demise of what was then called "The Project" in Milne Bay has remained on my mind ever since. Every time I've discussed or conducted planning in PNG (or elsewhere) it's been with the memory of how The Project self-destructed and what impact it left in the minds and hearts of local people and conservationists who not only witnessed it on the ground, but had invested themselves wholly in the proposed outcomes. There are the memories of the young, passionate conservationists who found themselves literally homeless and broke with suddenly no "project" to work on one day.

I haven't written about this incident in great length primarily because it has remained a sore spot and reminder of the dangers of big projects and big budgets in the biodiversity conservation world and how being a big organization is not necessarily better.

But I was forwarded a link to a story in The Nation that finally tells the sad tale in excruciating detail. In the current issue of The Nation (subscription needed for full version), writer Mark Dowie hunted down all the major players from Conservation International (from CI Chairman and CEO Peter Seligman to their PNG-based field staff) as well as all the various in-country participants and interlocutors to paint a picture of big-budget biodiversity conservation that is far from flattering.

Mismanaged funds, exorbitant expense accounts ($25,000 a day dive trips for cultivating donors), and a $6,443,022 total project budget that was spent two years before it was supposed to have been. Dowie doesn't hold back in his analysis, and I can only imagine that CI's PR team is working overtime to spin this. Actually, I suspect they've had a response crafted for a long time and have been just waiting for this shoe to finally drop.

I know personally almost every player in the story (save for CI's executive management) and sat together with most of the PNG partners and stakeholders during both the project's early good times (and there were some very good early results that get lost in the story) as well as the very dark end times. I suppose it's expedient to see Conservation International as a whole as the big bad of this story. But the reality is that the senior project management are really the ones at fault. And then Governor of Alotau Province in PNG also gets off rather lightly in the article when it was very clear that obstinate attitudes and bad decisions rest on his shoulders as well.

For our part in the story, I worked with and saw extremely talented, passionate, and sincere conservation professionals from PNG, Australia, the USA and beyond who were drawn to The Project because we shared a common vision of what ocean conservation at the community level could look like. I saw individuals invest their lives in this vision. These were people who genuinely believed that they were not just safeguarding coral reefs, but the local human communities who depend upon healthy reefs for their livelihoods. And I watched as these hopes shattered while hard-earned trust from local people was lost.

Ocean conservation efforts may return to the communities of Milne Bay someday. Perhaps CI may even return should political winds blow favorably. But the interest to be paid in regaining local trust and support for conservation (by Conservation International or anyone else) will certainly be significant. We all collectively took a black eye in how The Project unraveled. I can only hope that a black eye is the worst after-effect that PNG's people and their environmental future are subjected to.