Growing up on the island of Ua Huka in the Marquesas, Chloé Brown knew the birds around her. What she did not learn at school was why they mattered so deeply to the island itself.
Birds, she explained during this September’s 11th Pacific Islands Conference on Nature Conservation and Protected Areas in Nouméa, play a fundamental role in the stories and ecology of her island: dispersing seeds, pollinating plants and helping forests regenerate. Yet it was knowledge she only came to understand fully years later.
Today, that connection has become part of her conservation work. Through a BESTLIFE2030-supported project on Ua Huka, Chloé is helping strengthen the island’s biosecurity and protect bird species found nowhere else in the world.
Her story captured something that surfaced repeatedly throughout the conference: in the Pacific, conservation is rarely separate from people. It is connected to culture, identity, livelihoods and relationships with land and sea. Knowledge is carried through communities and generations, and action often begins with people who understand a place because they live there.
That spirit is captured in the Môo Mâ Awé Declaration, adopted at the conference as a shared statement of Pacific conservation priorities for 2026–2030. It calls for conservation grounded in Pacific cultures, traditional knowledge, languages and customary practices, and for communities to have a meaningful role in decisions about their own places.
It also raises an important question: if conservation knowledge and action are rooted locally, how should the finance intended to support them be designed?
For BESTLIFE2030, that question came into sharp focus during the session “Scaling Locally-Led Conservation in the Pacific”, which brought together local practitioners, community organisations, funders, NGOs and government representatives from across the Pacific conservation community to explore how locally led conservation can be supported, financed and scaled. Participants included representatives and grantees from the Kiwa Initiative.
One idea emerged clearly: small grants are not simply large conservation programmes with smaller budgets. They are a different form of finance, and much of their value lies precisely in that difference.
Small grants can reach organisations with deep local knowledge and strong community legitimacy that may not have specialist proposal writers, finance teams or compliance staff. In a region as geographically dispersed and culturally diverse as the Pacific, that proximity matters. Effective conservation is often intensely place-based, shaped by ecosystems, customary relationships and community priorities.
That also changes how we think about innovation.
Some of the most compelling examples shared in Nouméa did not begin with a new technology or an externally designed solution. They began with listening, local experience and a clear understanding of where ownership needed to sit.
Steve Yandima, an Indigenous community leader and conservationist from KG Wan in Papua New Guinea and a grantee of the Kiwa Initiative, described a conservation process that grew through village engagement, customary relationships and land tenure, gradually building support across clans and sub-clans. “The innovation is based on ground experience, based on ground interest, based on groundwork.”
Cameron Diver of Island Conservation approached the same idea from another angle. In French Polynesia, traditional concepts such as rāhui can provide a cultural frame for integrated coastal management, while newer tools such as remote sensing or eDNA can strengthen what communities already know. “It’s innovative to go back to the old ways, but it’s innovative to bring to the old ways the new ways.”
Locally led conservation is not simply about consulting communities once a project has already been designed. It starts by recognising that expertise, responsibility and solutions may already exist within those communities.
The challenge for funders is to help turn that knowledge and commitment into action without weakening the local ownership that made it possible.
But the way money is administered can also become part of the problem.
Small organisations are often expected to navigate systems built for much larger institutions. A local association may have only a handful of staff — sometimes one person carrying several roles — yet still face complex requirements for reporting, financial management, due diligence and compliance.
The question is not whether accountability matters. It does. The question is whether it is proportionate.
As John Clemo of New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade noted during the session, “The true investment goes beyond the activities on the ground today.”
Aurélie Ahmim-Richard of AFD reinforced that point, emphasising that the value of a grant should also be measured in terms of the strength it leaves behind: “The local project results shouldn’t be assessed only through conservation results, but also to what extent we have strengthened these organisations.”
A successful small grant can leave behind far more than the outputs listed in a proposal. It can strengthen governance and financial management, build partnerships, develop confidence and make an organisation better equipped to secure and manage future funding. Those gains may be less immediately visible than a restored habitat or a completed activity, but they can be just as important to conservation over the long term.
Grant-making therefore has to do more than move money. It must also make room for reality.
Projects rarely unfold exactly as imagined on paper. Weather changes. Transport is disrupted. Community availability shifts. Institutional processes take longer than expected. Ecological conditions evolve.
Marc Oremus of WWF New Caledonia captured the balance succinctly: “Be clear and demanding about the conservation outcomes and accountability but give local actors some flexibility and help to get there.”
That principle was strongly echoed in a learning workshop held during the conference with practitioners of the Kiwa Initiative and BESTLIFE2030. Thirty-three participants representing 19 projects across French Polynesia, New Caledonia and Wallis and Futuna reflected on what would make grant-making more effective in practice.
What participants called for was strikingly practical: simpler reporting, more resources directed towards implementation, timely approvals and disbursements, and enough flexibility for projects to adapt as circumstances change.
One theme surfaced repeatedly: funding alone is rarely enough.
Regular dialogue with someone who understands the local context can help identify problems early, connect organisations with expertise and strengthen capacity while the project is still underway.
Seen this way, good grant management is less about control and more about partnership.
The conversation in Nouméa also pushed beyond the lifespan of an individual grant. Small grants can be highly effective at helping an idea get started. The harder question is what happens when that idea starts gaining traction.
Short funding cycles can end just as an initiative is gathering momentum. Ecological change takes time. Institutional change does too. Organisations can lose staff, monitoring can be interrupted and relationships weakened before a promising project has had the chance to mature.
This is why the discussion around “scaling” was so important.
Scaling does not have to mean turning every successful small project into a much larger one. It can mean helping an organisation become stronger, sharing lessons between islands, connecting a local group with national or regional finance, supporting umbrella organisations, or enabling an approach developed in one place to inform policy and practice elsewhere.
That distinction matters in the Pacific, where diversity is not an obstacle to overcome but one of the region’s defining strengths. The aim is not to copy solutions from one island to another, but to share what has been learned while respecting the conditions that made them work.
This is also where the small-grants discussion connects most strongly with the Môo Mâ Awé Declaration. It calls for conservation that responds to the cultural, environmental and economic needs of Pacific peoples. It also emphasises sustainable finance, stronger regional cooperation and approaches that respect the ways Pacific communities understand and relate to their world.
For BESTLIFE2030, the discussions in Nouméa were both affirming and challenging.
They reinforced the value of small grants as a way of bringing conservation finance closer to the people who know a place best. But they also underlined something more demanding: how funding is designed can matter as much as how much is made available.
Small grants work because they can stay close to the people, knowledge and relationships that make conservation possible. The aim is not to make them resemble large programmes. It is to design them well enough to preserve what makes them powerful in the first place.
Chloé Brown’s own BESTLIFE2030 project brings the story back to Ua Huka.
Through IA VAIKU’A IA UA HUKA, she is helping strengthen biosecurity on one of the last Pacific islands still free from the black rat, protecting two critically endangered bird species found nowhere else on Earth.
The intervention is concrete: one island, one threat, one detection dog.
But that is precisely the point.
Chloé grew up with these birds before fully understanding what they meant to Ua Huka’s forests, stories and identity. Today, she is helping make sure they remain there for the next generation to know.
That is what a well-designed small grant can do: stay close to a place, close to its people, and protect something that cannot be replaced.
