Funders, both public and private should look to:
- Provide more intersectoral funding to bring together development and conservation objectives
- Reassess risk profiles or consider risk differently to kickstart innovation. Lack of efficiency can be offset to the potential for long-term sustainability and resilience of outcomes
- Channel more funding upfront for the design stage for the meaningful participation of local and marginalised actors.
- Consider funding legacy work that is successful, so funding opportunities are less driven by innovations
- Consider the design and governance of their funding channels – and the extent to which IPLCs / local actors can influence decisions over funding
- Where they work with intermediaries, to ensure those intermediaries do genuinely add value, rather than act as gatekeepers.
Funding intermediaries should look to:
- absorb more of the risk
- meaningfully add value to delivery, for example by pooling many smaller initiatives that would otherwise not attract funding
- support more integrated approaches – e.g. linking health and biodiversity outcomes
- support learning and build capacity of smaller organisations to develop and become lead organisations over time
- provide greater transparency on overheads and openness about how money is spent (challenge exists for governments that are seeking to keep track and audit funding that bypasses them goes directly from donors to local / national organisations)