Q&A: Darren Walker on heeding the wisdom, and funding the work, of local communities

SAN FRANCISCO — When Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, listens to representatives from indigenous peoples organizations in meetings surrounding the Global Climate Action Summit, he is left with a question: Who is funding them? “What you often hear [from donors] is, we don’t have a mechanism to reach people on the ground, or we’re not comfortable giving money to an intermediary,” he said. There are increasing numbers of vehicles for funding local solutions, such as “networks of regional organizations that are primed for impact,” Walker said — and he hopes to lead by example. The Ford Foundation was one of nine foundations that announced a $459 million pledge at the Governors’ Climate and Forests Task Force meeting on Tuesday to conserve forests primarily by protecting the rights of indigenous people to their lands. “The old adage that there just isn’t anybody to give the money to in communities who we can trust, who are competent, who aren’t corrupt, is a legacy that has been disproved,” he said. Walker spoke with Devex ahead of the Global Climate Action Summit about the link between climate change and equality, the importance of listening to local voices, and the challenges and opportunities for funders to support local solutions. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. One of your big messages here in San Francisco is about viewing climate change through the lens of inequality. How would you describe the global development community's current progress on that intersection? What is working, what is not, what more is needed? We have to start with where the global development community started, which was around the issue of poverty. We should all be proud of the fact that poverty has been reduced around the world. Poverty remains a problem. But during times such as these, when it can be easy to be depressed or discouraged, we need to celebrate the fact that hundreds of millions of people have better living standards. With that as a backdrop, how do we move from understanding that poverty matters to understanding that inequality matters? Because inequality has an impact on poverty, too. “Most of the development community — most, until recently — have been aligned around the idea of supporting democratic values, supporting civil society, supporting notions of democratic institutions.” --— The global development community understands inequality, increasingly because of the consequences of inequality, which are harmful to democratic values. And most of the development community — most, until recently — have been aligned around the idea of supporting democratic values, supporting civil society, supporting notions of democratic institutions. Inequality is harmful to the ideology of democracy and the ideology of social progress and inclusion of more people, because inequality creates insecurity, economic vulnerability, and people are more precarious. And when people are more precarious, they often become more angry, disillusioned, and desperate, and when inequality grows, so does authoritarianism, so does the acceptability of ideologies that would have been rejected years ago. The development community is coming to grips with the consequences of inequality — in a way in which we understand the consequences of poverty differently and more urgently and more personally. Many of us may have worked on poverty issues, but we didn't actually know any poor people personally. Today, because inequality is so pervasive, few of us, no matter how privileged we are, don't know someone who has been impacted by the consequences of inequality. Climate change naturally will be more harmful to those communities that are most vulnerable, and as a result, it will have an unequal impact on people. You've talked about the importance of indigenous peoples and local communities being in the driver's seat for climate action. And yet most funding does not go to these groups. What are the reasons for that? Ideology stands in the way. Arrogance stands in the way. Tradition and customary policy stand in the way. Because today, right now, there are remarkable organizations — indigenous, authentic, locally based — that are prepared and have the absorptive capacity to do more work and have greater impact than they’re having but lack the resources. What I think has changed today — and this is something that has happened in development writ large — is a reckoning with the idea that we, meaning we credentialed experts from the North, do not have the solutions, that the solutions to many of the problems we in the development community are missioned to solve can only be solved through investing in the ideas and institutions and innovations that are generated by community people. You need to work with indigenous people, local communities, whether you're talking about community revitalization in far East Brooklyn or whether you're talking about remote parts of the Amazon, you need to heed their wisdom. Let’s return to the commitment that was made today. How would you define its significance, what are some outcomes you hope for, and what will your metrics of success be? I see the announcement today in the context of a legacy of investments over decades. So it's important to remember that today's announcement was made possible because there were years of advocacy. For example, this morning we heard the United Nations special rapporteur on indigenous peoples talk about how getting her office established at the U.N., getting recognition that the rights of indigenous people was worthy of recognition by the U.N. took years of work, and that was funded in large part by foundations. So fast forward to 2018. That idea was a marginal idea at best, the idea that indigenous peoples should have the title, right, agency over their land. That idea now has moved from the margins to the mainstream. Normative discourse about climate change solutions until recently ignored indigenous people, and in fact we won't get to a climate solution without addressing land management and deforestation, and we can't effectively do that without going through these communities and these peoples and hearing and listening to their voices. The fact that we now have normalized the idea of indigenous peoples’ rights over forests in climate solutions discourse is a breakthrough and that is in many ways what today represents. “Philanthropy shouldn't be a feel-good industry. This is a life and death sector that impacts people's lives in profound ways. And in no way is that more manifest than in the issue of climate.” --— At the Ford Foundation we talk a lot about understanding the difference between outputs and impact, and having a relentless focus on the impact, and understanding that you need those incremental outputs. So a year from now we should be able to measure how many more indigenous rights organizations received money, and aggregate and understand how the flows of grant dollars and investment dollars to them has shifted over a period of time, as a result of our investment. We will be able to measure how many hectares of forest are under their management, for example. We will be able to measure how many governments have signed on to, for example, the land tenure facility, or how many corporations have signed on to various agreements with community-based organizations. So there are lots of ways in which we can measure success, but those are all outputs, just to be clear. The impact is, 10 years from now, how many hectares are now under better management so that the climate is being impacted positively, how many lives have been saved as a result of the ways in which carbon is captured, how many ideas have been generated that have actually turned into solutions that we can actually calculate? And so we have to be relentless about impact, because ultimately philanthropy shouldn't be a feel-good industry. This is a life and death sector that impacts people's lives in profound ways. And in no way is that more manifest than in the issue of climate.