Scaling What Works: Community-Led Models for Conservation and Climate Resilience
Community-led conservation is increasingly recognized as a promising approach to protecting ecosystems while strengthening livelihoods and climate resilience. But demonstrating that a model works in one place is very different from building the evidence, financing, partnerships, and local capacity required to take it further.
Using Akashinga's women-led, community-driven conservation model as a live case study, this session will examine what it takes to move from a successful landscape-level intervention to a model that can operate across countries and contexts. The focus will be less on making the case for community-led conservation and more on confronting the practical questions that emerge when it begins to scale.
What does credible, replicable evidence of impact look like across ecologically and socially diverse landscapes? How can we design programs that are appropriately replicable yet adaptable to new landscapes? And, what does genuine local leadership look like in complex environments?
The aim is to examine both the promise and the friction of scaling what works. How do you grow without losing the local ownership that made a model effective in the first place? Which elements should be replicated, and which need to adapt? And how can funders and partners support growth without turning a community-led model into something communities no longer lead?
What to expect
A practical conversation structured around three questions: evidence, financing, and local ownership. Akashinga's experience will provide a concrete starting point, with additional perspectives from audience members on different approaches and modalities. Rather than a broad discussion of nature-based solutions, attendees will dig into the operational realities and trade-offs of moving proven approaches beyond the pilot stage, with space to challenge assumptions about what “scale” should actually mean.
Who this is for
This session is for conservation and climate funders, government leaders, impact investors, practitioners, policymakers, and others interested in community-led approaches to conservation and the practical challenge of financing and scaling them without sacrificing local leadership.
What you will get out of it
A practical view of what it takes to move community-led conservation from proof of concept to greater scale
Perspectives on building credible evidence across diverse landscapes
A deeper examination of what genuine local leadership looks like in practice
Lessons on balancing replication with adaptation as models expand across landscapes and countries
Hosted by
Akashinga