What I Hope: Changing Perceptions to Change Results

What’s the Problem? At the community level, the word conservation in the Pacific Islands is often weighed down by negative perceptions. It’s frequently perceived as being driven by international non-governmental organisations. Conservation, it is said, is about protecting things, like biodiversity, but not about helping me meet my needs. Indeed, many say it’s a Western approach, led by foreign experts, to saving the land and sea, but it’s not about helping us.

Now consider, in the Pacific Islands, where rural communities are highly reliant on natural resources, the need to better manage natural resources is not at all abstract and not about intrinsic values. It’s about meeting basic needs. But in truth, the engagement from NGOs can at times be overly technical and focus on scientific priorities instead of local priorities, and can also rely too much on foreign experts, that as a result, it sounds like a foreign concept.

What’s the Solution? If you take a closer look, in a place like Fiji, there is a wealth of history managing resources and a wealth of local voices, who can flip that script. These are local champions who can explain in stories just why conservation matters and motivate others to listen and act. That’s the rationale behind our What I Hope video series. Working the Fiji Locally-Managed Marine Area Network, we created short testimonials from local champions on just why they promote conservation and what they hope for, for their community they are from or work with.

We primarily distribute these on social media, and promote their use in community workshops to help better frame the discussions, shifting the focus from a foreign idea to a local mission. The results were strong online and in person. People responded with heartfelt thanks. The videos helped shift dialogues from being perceived as an NGO-centric to one that was about helping protect some local, something cherished. The next steps were to create enough of them to help repeat the message and prove that in fact locally-driven and for local priorities. This was an unfunded messaging experiment to help FLMMA. We have since put these lessons into practice in our formal campaigns through the frequent use of champion videos.