Engaging in Community-based Marine Conservation: The Pacific Way

Executive Summary

In the early 1990s, marine conservation was a new frontier in the growing global conservation movement. Soon, conservation led by and rooted in communities began to emerge as an effective method to protect natural areas. This community-based approach actually reflected Pacific island traditions and has led to the protection and management of more than 600 marine areas of all sizes and types across the Pacific island region, including Hawai‘i.

After 25 years, many at the forefront of community-based marine conservation are moving on, taking decades of experience with them. With the generous support of the Acacia Conservation Fund, The Nature Conservancy’s Hawai‘i marine program launched this pilot project to capture some of their tacit institutional knowledge—knowledge that led to many advances in community-based marine conservation.

Our project goal was to:

• Understand the key lessons learned by leaders engaged in community-based marine conservation in Hawai‘i and the Pacific over the past 25+ years, and
• Disseminate those lessons to a new generation of conservation professionals and community partners to help catalyze and accelerate conservation efforts across the Pacific.

For this pilot project, we interviewed 19 veteran and emerging community-based marine conservation leaders who shared personal insights and revealed hard-won knowledge about how to build conservation partnerships that deliver lasting results. From these interviews, we extracted powerful, interconnected insights and lessons that captured knowledge so intuitive it is rarely acknowledged or codified.

This valuable tacit knowledge is difficult to articulate and capture, yet essential to share with a new generation of conservation professionals if we hope to advance and accelerate conservation across the region. The report is divided into five sections:

• The Pacific Way underscores the importance of honoring the culture, history, and tradition of each place, which every leader we interviewed highlighted as essential for success in the region.
• Getting Started in a New Place offers insights on thoughtful engagement of leaders, partners, and allies to help ensure efforts are built on a strong foundation.
• Embarking on a Partnership highlights principles that are fundamental to successful partnerships, emphasizing the importance of clarity, inclusiveness, and true collaboration.
• Making it Endure reflects guidance to help ensure local leaders, communities, and institutions are able to lead robust conservation efforts into the future.
• Scaling Up offers insights on how success at sites can be used to achieve impacts at larger scales and illustrates the incredible value of networking through case studies from Hawai‘i, the Solomon Islands, and Micronesia .

The interviews also provided valuable career guidance for young professionals and the pilot project offered lessons in the knowledge capture process. These can be found in Helpful Resources. Background on the pilot project can be found in About the Project.

Our direct outreach is focused on sharing these findings with the colleagues, partners and networks that we work with most closely to increase the likelihood that the knowledge shared will be used and expanded upon. The success of this work will be measured by its value to conservation leaders and teams working with communities in the field across Hawai‘i and the Pacific.

This pilot project will fully achieve its goals if it also inspires others to champion this essential work to capture institutional knowledge and commit to actively share such knowledge within and across their teams and networks. Integrating the powerful habit of reflection into a variety of conservation settings will accelerate learning and elicit the often unspoken wisdom and contributions of the diverse people, organizations, and cultures that make lasting conservation possible.