CJRF funds women, youth, and indigenous people to create and share their own solutions for climate resilience. We focus on how our partners’ efforts can drive systems-level change in their communities, nations, and around the world. We are at an exciting point in our development where our partners are generating significant results. Now, we’re exploring lessons from their progress and how we can best share these lessons with the broader climate action community.
In early December, we hosted a webinar called “Shifting Society for an Equitable, Climate-safe Future.” This was the second in a series of webinars that we are hosting to share what we’re learning from the work of our grantee partners and fellow climate justice activists.
During this session, we compiled five critical recommendations for researchers, funders, and practitioners to better support grassroots efforts for transformative climate justice. We heard from panelists from IDRC, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, ClimateWorks Foundation, and CJRF grantee partners Maasai Mara Wildlife Conservancies Association and Pawanka Fund. We also tapped into the knowledge of participants in our breakout groups.
Lesson #1: Recognize and embrace complexity in local systems
While many aspects of the human experience are universal, each community’s power structures and ways of adapting to change are different. Therefore, no concrete set of best practices will work in every community. For funders, embracing this reality means not shying away from complexity within programs and organizations. They should focus on building strong processes rather than replicating programs to generate predicted outcomes. Systemic change processes are rarely linear, and funders need to come up with different pathways to manage contextual challenges and opportunities.
For researchers looking to further climate justice and resilience, it is critical to understand how change happens in each community and then situate research accordingly. For researchers, practitioners, and funders alike, embracing complexity means understanding the context, collecting more relevant data that is grounded in local knowledge, and being willing to adapt to changing circumstances.
Lesson #2: Deeply co-create and collaborate
Deep co-creation starts with how we identify the challenges our desired change will address. Many communities facing climate change impacts ask pressing and practical questions: “Can we continue to live in this place and survive, and if so, how?” Co-creating change begins with letting communities define the research agenda and listening to what they are interested in learning. Researchers must connect their often “global north” agendas for climate action to issues that are affecting communities now—like food and water scarcity, for example. Researchers must see communities as partners and important knowledge-holders, rather than people whose “capacities need strengthening.”
Funders and practitioners also need to collaborate and co-create. Not every funder needs a unique strategy for climate justice. It’s important to coordinate efforts and collaborate with others across geographies, ages, genders, institutions, fields, and industries. Funders can also help their partners collaborate by supporting peer learning opportunities and knowledge exchanges. Peer learning allows deep human connections to develop, building relationships that facilitate collective action, shared goals, and efforts that are not siloed or duplicative.
Lesson #3: Recognize power dynamics and work to distribute power
Transformational change requires an understanding of power and the willingness to let go of it. Funders and those in leadership positions must focus on decentralizing power. This is the only way to ensure that the brunt and benefits of climate action are equitably distributed. Funders, researchers, and other powerful outsiders should not impose pre-conceived strategies or their own institutional needs on local communities.
Decentralizing power means supporting communities as they develop and share their own narratives and reducing barriers to funding like requiring long organizational histories or immaculate financial records. In addition, funders can distribute power by listening to local communities’ priorities, sharing research findings and knowledge, and being flexible with funding.
Decentralizing power also means recognizing that change is not linear. Projects may “fail” to reach their objectives over a certain timeframe, but that is never the end of the story for people who continue to live in the community. Funders and outside practitioners need to embrace risk to ensure that partners on the ground feel supported in their efforts to create change in new and dynamic ways.
Finally, this means looking inward at philanthropy’s own private sector investments and commercial activities. Do they ensure that capital is generated in a way that supports climate justice values? Or do they undermine these values? It may be that funders and organizations are reinforcing their power in ways that disempower local communities and leave them with even fewer resources to adapt to the changing climate and build resilience.
Lesson #4: Make the connection between local efforts and global transformational change
Locally led initiatives are effective at addressing the challenges of communities hardest hit by climate change. But how can this local-level change can drive transformation at national and global levels? We know that top-down, technical solutions can only take us part of the way to our goal of a climate-safe and just future. How do we harness the successes of community-driven movements to cross this middle ground and take us the rest of the way?
One critical piece of this effort is to better articulate the specific climate justice elements of the many place-based solutions to show the collective impact of these efforts. We need to move away from working in separate corners to see how climate justice-focused action is connected regionally and globally, and how it leads to the emergence of new structures on which to build a more equitable future.
Lesson #5: Systems change takes time
The final lesson is one of patience. While we urgently need the world to change now, real change takes time. New policies can be enacted quickly but altering what people believe and how we act is a much longer process that relies on consistent work and dedication. Practitioners, funders, and researchers need to take a long view on what can be accomplished while remaining ambitious and hopeful in the short term.
Practically, this means that funders will need to stop thinking in terms of short-term projects, and instead invest in longer grant cycles and measurement methods that will guide us for the long haul. Funders and practitioners must also respect cultural ideas of time in the communities they are trying to impact. By investing more time into a community, we will all be better prepared to take lessons learned and put them into practice in the future.
We look forward to continuing to share the lessons of our dynamic portfolio of grants. If you have lessons to add to this list, reach out to us on Twitter @CJRFund and make sure to use the hashtag #climatejustice.
