About the Program

The Kinship Conservation Fellows program will strengthen your capacity to design and lead conservation programs by demonstrating the power of market-based tools and collaborative principles. During your month in Bellingham, you will discuss real-world applications of market-based tools, integrating applied economic, finance, management, and planning principles to support conservation. Peer-learning sessions, facilitated by faculty, will help you collaborate with other Fellows to improve your work. The 2022 Fellows program will incorporate interactive discussions, role-plays, skills practice, and field visits to help you improve the way you interpret and respond to complex environmental conservation problems.

2022 Program Themes

The program integrates leading-edge lessons from the following two themes:

Cultivating Leadership: Tools and Strategies

Exercising leadership in the context of environmental conservation requires learning to deal with complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity, paradoxes, and change. Throughout the month, you will become familiar with a set of tools and frameworks to help you exercise leadership at the individual, organizational, and systems levels and you will learn key principles and practices used in the Adaptive Leadership™ framework.

Market-based Conservation Strategies

The starting point of the course is the basic question of “why” market tools. Why, philosophically and practically, can market-based tools best solve some conservation problems (but not all)? We will then turn to the “what” of market tools. What parts of economic theory and practice can be used by conservationists? We will cover the basics of supply/demand, economic valuation, and what economic and statistical tools can be used to further our conservation goals.

For most of our program, however, we will focus on the “how” of market tools. Most conservation professionals now accept that the philosophical and mechanical logic of market tools has practical value, so how are market tools actually performing? Practitioners from around the world will discuss a series of case studies, using inductive reasoning to help you glean lessons that can be applied to your own work. You will learn how market tools have been used in protected areas, watersheds, and coastal fisheries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia; how these tools do and don’t work in the field; and how the lessons of their use can be applied to your project.

The final question we will address is how to “mainstream” your ideas. You will only change the world if you can take your projects to scale—by growing them and turning them into a government policy or standard business practice. You will spend much of your post-Kinship life trying to figure out how to repeat and scale up your successes, and learn from your failures; we will end the month with a few ideas on how you may start to do this.

Individual and Group Projects

You are expected to bring a project to the program that you can develop further during the month in residence. The project should represent an activity that you are undertaking individually or collaboratively in your current work, or an initiative that you hope to develop in the near future. It is expected that your project will advance conservation goals through the use of market-based tools. Helping you develop your project forms the focus of much of our session work, particularly in the peer-learning activities scheduled throughout the program. In consultation with the program director, you will be permitted to change or adapt the project described in your application and/or develop an alternative project individually or with other Fellows.

You are required to present your project at two points during the program, demonstrating how you’ve advanced your thinking at each interval. During the first half of the program, you will present your preliminary project ideas in a workshop to your peers. The program director will work with you to decide the best way to present your ideas. You will present for 30 minutes (question time included) to the entire group about the current state of your project. During the final week of the program, you will present a 25-minute, formal summary of your project and the work you have completed to advance it. The presentation will be delivered to an audience of Fellows, Faculty, Advisory Council members, and other guests of the program.

Readings

You will receive a copy of the following books during program registration:

The Practice of Adaptive Leadership

Ronald A. Heifetz, Marty Linksy, and Alexander Grashow

Harvard Business Press, 2009

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...and Others Don’t

Jim Collins

HarperCollins Publishers, 2001

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