Brett Jenks, Rare’s CEO, blogs about his trip to Asia, where he visited Pride campaigns taking place in China and Indonesia. Follow Brett’s adventures as he witnesses local conservation efforts to protect endangered species in Asia and shares how the Pride campaign model can support lasting conservation impact in this part of the world.

I started off my day with a video Skype conference call with my kids, Ben and Emma.

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They took turns pulling each other off-screen and interrupting each other’s stories about homework, basketball and the weather. It’s amazing to sit in a hotel room in Kunming and have a video conference with 11- and 13-year-old children in Arlington, VA.

I couldn’t be more proud of the work the China team is doing. It was only about 11 months ago that Nigel finished hiring this team and they have already launched Rare’s globally accredited Master’s Degree in Communications for conservationists at Southwest Forestry College, built a network of hundreds of local government officials and conservation organizations and launched a first cohort of Pride campaigns addressing a range of complex and important issues.

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While the campaign in Meili Snow Mountain addresses energy consumption and green building, campaigns elsewhere are doing some pretty fascinating things:

• In Hunchun Nature Reserve, the local government and Wildlife Conservation Society are saving the last remaining Siberian tigers in China.
• In Baima Snow Mountain, local villagers are learning how to reduce the consumption of fuelwood by using solar water heaters.
• In Gaoligong Mountain Nature Reserve, the campaign manager is working to increase the use of energy-efficient stoves, electric stoves, and electric rice cookers in local households.

Not bad for a start up conservation program in China in year two!

There is a long list of what’s working, and it’s great to hear it directly from our field staff after a year of dramatic change at Rare:

• Rare’s partners appreciate the careful planning of each campaign and are surprised by the rigor of our new approach to “removing barriers to behavior change.”
• The mascots of the first China campaigns are getting rave reviews.
• Partnerships with NGOs, government officials and Southwest Forestry College are all very positive, which is not always the case in these complicated and interdependent arrangements we make.
• The new Master’s degree — which is accredited by University of Texas at El Paso but taught here in Kunming, China — is well received by partners all over the country. (We had been worried that the Chinese would thumb their noses at a foreign Master’s but quite the contrary.)
• The rollout of training has been better than expected. Hearing this from the China team is a big deal given that we gave them about four months to translate the new global Master’s curriculum and then learn to teach it, when some of our staff don’t even have Master’s degrees. This was a monumental task and they deserve huge kudos for getting it done.

Not surprisingly, there is an equally long list of what we are going to improve. One of the big ones is a sense of confidence that little old Rare can make an impact in China. Our staff has watched The Nature Conservancy relocate its China headquarters to Beijing from Kunming and reallocate staff to work more on national conservation strategies.

The message from some partners has been clear: China has 1.4 billion people. What are a handful of Pride campaigns going to do?

It’s a fair question, but I’d argue that most of China’s biodiversity lies in the southwest where high mountains, diverse climates and cultures and relatively low populations are not only conducive to Rare’s approach but, in fact, necessitate it . The Chinese have a saying:

“The mountains are high and the emperor is far, far away.”

The fact is, like many multinational companies, we are learning that you can’t succeed in China simply by having support in Beijing.

Many of the threats to nature in the most biologically diverse areas are local. Those threats are cultural and they have to do with local forestry, home construction, fishing, water usage, agriculture, etc. National reforms don’t make the desired impact unless municipal leaders act on and enforce them.

What does work in China is the scaling of locally-proven methods. The government, once it finds something that works, has no problem rolling out solutions far beyond the scope of any NGO I’ve ever seen. So if Rare can get a few models working in the coming years and train the local leadership needed to replicate them, the bet we’re making is that the municipal and even provincial governments will take them and run.
But confidence will only come in time.

Other things we’re going to fix:

• We need to improve the project management skills of our staff and campaign partners. These projects are increasingly complex. It’s not easy coordinating NGOs and government offices to provide new skills and financing while running social marketing programs to mobilize communities, especially when you expect results in just a few years. Some of what we’re doing is unprecedented and the management skills to make it work must be newly developed and then taught throughout our network.
• Priority-setting: As we consider what environmental threats to prioritize and what local conservation solutions we aim to roll out next year, our team is hearing an array of partner and expert voices, each with their own strong opinion about where we should focus. It’s great to be in demand, but we have some difficult decisions to make.
• Mastering a new way of working. The China team has a new curriculum, plus they’re rolling out a much-revised version of the traditional Pride campaign; and because Rare is growing and taking seriously global quality control, they have to grapple with new systems for reporting and the expectations of social media use and online storytelling. It’s a lot to manage for any team, much less a group of five in Kunming. While I know they’re going to do it, I am not sure they know it yet.

>>Brett’s Slideshow