Q&A: How to change behavior before conservation challenges become crises

SAN FRANCISCO — While blast fishing — which is using explosives to stun and kill fish — is illegal, it is still practiced in places where desperation is high and dynamite is available. One example is the Philippines, which is home to more marine-protected areas than any other country, but has seen a steady decline in average catch per day due, in part, to destructive fishing practices that destroy ecosystems. “No take zones” — areas where fishermen are not allowed to catch in order to allow stock to replenish — will not work without individual behavior change, said Brett Jenks, CEO of Rare, a conservation organization that trains local leaders to inspire their communities to take pride in natural resource management. He spoke to Devex about how social marketing can turn members of communities into guardians of the environment. The conversation here has been edited for length and clarity. The first example of what you now refer to as a “Pride Campaign” was in 1977, when conservationist Paul Butler created a mascot to save the St. Lucia parrot. Since then, Rare has refined its strategy for social marketing for conservation, through hundreds of campaigns around the world. What have you learned about how to effectively tap into local pride for global conservation? Consider conservation organizations that work with governments to set up national parks or marine-protected areas. Initially, there is a conservation victory, because this means someone in government and ideally the people locally have agreed something needs to change in this area. Then conservation organizations say, ‘Okay, now we have a park, now we have to enforce the rules.’ That’s when the problems begin, either because no one told the people living in the park about the change, or because no one took the time or had the experience to say, ‘Okay what is the motivation for the people eking out a living on this land to change? How will this bring enough benefits to society? What are the social, not just legal, pressures to make that change?’ If the threat is to farming or fishing or industrial practices, the principal audience of the campaign must be the actual actors whose behavior needs to change in order to create a sustainable economy. But we can’t neglect the one step removed, the next circle of influences — the families, husbands, wives, siblings, cousins, local city councils, mayors, eventually the governor, and at times the ministers. There is a system in place and the marketing has to target the individual behavior, but also has to build a reinforcing set of social norms that mean a bad actor is ostracized. Rare has done 350 campaigns in 56 countries. There are lots of examples where turtle poachers become the stewards of the environment; where the best fishermen become the leaders of the movement to set catch limits; where the leading farmers are the ones to begin to promote organic farming practices. And we have partnered with much larger conservation organizations that have identified the problem and set up the national parks or marine-protected areas and asked us to come in and work with communities to build the sustainable behavior change that is tantamount to their success. The challenge that becomes the opportunity for conservation is that if we can take an empathetic approach to the needs and the desires and the worldviews of these people, we will be much more effective in designing a change effort that helps them see the benefits for society so they can lead the change themselves. Let’s talk about the Philippines. You’ve just sent a team of human-centered designers there to evaluate your current approach to leveraging behavior change to address the overfishing problem. What are you learning from the Philippines that might apply to other rights-based fishery management systems? The Philippines has developed a reputation as a leader in setting up marine-protected areas. Just about every municipality has a really small MPA off their coast. This is a perfect example of conservation as a development priority: 100 million people, and some of the world’s most climate vulnerable and poor coastal people, live in the Philippines. More than 50 percent of their animal protein comes from the sea, so they depend on the sea for their protein and livelihoods. And 95 to 99 percent of local fishers are artisanal, not industrial, so they’re eking out a living with a few miles of the coast. “Policy, economics and technology have gone a really long way to solving a number of environmental challenges. But our climate is still changing, our fisheries are still collapsing, our oceans are still filling up with plastic.” --— Brett Jenks, CEO at Rare The coasts of the Philippines are open-access fisheries. Until recently, anyone could fish anywhere they wanted. The development concept was to sustain these open-access fisheries if municipalities could create MPAs, and if local fisherman could be guardians and stewards of them. If the MPAs can be protected, then fish will get big and old and fat, and they’ll spawn and spill over into fishing areas, and that will make fisheries sustainable. The problem was, like most MPAs around the world, these were really paper parks. Any rigorous analysis would say that less than 10 percent of MPAs are actually protected — and it does nothing to avert overfishing in the areas around them. So what you end up with is very little protection of the MPAs and widespread overfishing beyond them. From a development standpoint, you see a three-generation, 60-year decline, of catch per unit effort. This used to be a conservation challenge. It’s headed toward humanitarian crisis. Six years ago, we got really interested in this problem of coastal fisheries. We asked, ‘How are we going to learn quickly what’s working around the world?’ We created an online platform called Solution Search. We put up prize money and from the applications we identified a handful of really promising bright spots in conservation and community development. One was the concept of a territorial use rights for fishing, or TURF. If the local fishermen can buy into this idea and design their own TURF, they get an exclusive license to fish in that area. In the same way that land tenure has helped agrarian land reform and productivity and sustainability, having a kind of marine tenure in the form of a TURF is a game changer for a country like the Philippines. The local fishermen, if well trained and mentored and empowered, can manage the fishery around their MPA. Coming full circle to behavior change in the Philippines, the Pride mascot campaigns are focused on a series of new behaviors, from no fishing in the no take zone — which fishermen now have the incentive not to do because they have an exclusive right to fish in the area around the MPA — to working with the community fishing management council to establish gear restrictions that promote sustainability, to setting municipal catch limits inside those territories. That’s how behavior change and conservation of common pool resources sparks development. Let’s talk about what’s next for Rare. You recently raised $10 million for the Meloy Fund, an impact investment fund for sustainable fisheries in Indonesia and the Philippines; and you’re launching the Center for Behavior & the Environment. Can you talk about the motivations for these two first-of-their-kind initiatives? “It’s irresponsible to bring private capital to the coastal fisheries sector before you have sustainable governance.” --— Brett Jenks, CEO at Rare We’re very enthusiastic about the potential for blended finance in conservation. We’re working on a deal in the Philippines to blend philanthropy, government budget allocations and development finance to catalyze investment from the capital markets. Over the past five years, working in more than 50 municipalities along the coast, we’ve used philanthropic dollars to build proof points for fishery recovery and strong relationships with local mayors. Now that these mayors are starting to allocate part of their municipal budgets to support this work, it’s easier to begin to speak with federal authorities about additional support for sustainable fisheries. This year, we also launched the first impact investment fund for coastal fisheries, which represents private investment capital. Those flows coming from different capital providers with different risk-return, as well as impact expectations, is what it will take to solve a large-scale natural resource management problem like that in coastal fisheries. What’s clear to us is it’s irresponsible to bring private capital to the coastal fisheries sector before you have sustainable governance. All that private money has offered fisheries is more boats, more nets, more lines, more technology, more pressure and more overfishing. If you have governance in place, it reduces the risk to private capital and it actually boosts returns in the long term. With Bloomberg Philanthropies’ help, we started working with Encourage Capital to look at potential ways of bringing private capital to fisheries, and what was identified is that the appetite for risk is not very high when it comes to fisheries. We created the Meloy Fund as a pilot. For 25 years, Rare has been working on behavior change in remote and rural areas throughout the developing world. It started in St. Lucia, getting people to stop poaching what had become their national bird, the St. Lucia parrot. That was the first Pride campaign and we’ve replicated that 350 times in 56 countries with different problems and different leaders. As we’ve honed this practice of a repeatable social marketing and behavior change model, over those 30 years neuroscience and social psychology and behavioral economics have built a growing base of new insights into how we make decisions. We want to create a center to bridge the academic world of social science and the practitioner world of behavioral economics. “We want to inspire more conservationists to use effective behavioral approaches in their work.” --— Brett Jenks, CEO at Rare Policy, economics and technology have gone a really long way to solving a number of environmental challenges. But our climate is still changing, our fisheries are still collapsing, our oceans are still filling up with plastic, our supply of freshwater is still being depleted — and a lot of these problems need to be solved at what’s often called the last mile, where people simply have to start behaving differently. Over the past several decades, Rare has used its signature Pride campaigns to boost adoption of more sustainable behaviors among targeted audiences. The center will actively keep this methodology aligned with cutting edge insights into the science of human behavior. The center is also a response to growing demand from governments, NGOs and local communities to train local and community leaders to promote behavior change and advance sustainable behaviors. So in addition to increasing the volume of this training, we want to improve its quality by revising and updating the toolkit we offer conservation practitioners with the very best science available. We want to inspire more conservationists to use effective behavioral approaches in their work, and we want to inspire more behavioral scientists and human-centered designers to work on solutions to the big challenges we’re facing like climate change, overfishing and the like. We know a lot about what cooperative behavior looks like in the laboratory, but now we have a global laboratory in the field and that means big opportunities for the science of human behavior, as much as it does for the field of conservation. 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