Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries.
In the world of conservation, good intentions have not always made for good outcomes. The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), one of the most recognizable environmental organizations on the planet, learned this the hard way. In 2019, it faced allegations that park rangers it supported had committed serious human rights abuses — including torture and killings — in several countries. The ensuing scandal did more than tarnish the organization’s reputation. It forced a reckoning.
Six years on, WWF says it has overhauled not just its protocols, but its philosophy.
“What started off as a response to a criticism … has now really been internalized at the highest strategic levels of WWF,” Kirsten Schuijt, the group’s director-general, told Mongabay’s David Akana in a recent conversation at the Villars Institute Global Learning Conference in Switzerland.
At the heart of this change is a shift away from “fortress conservation” — the long-dominant model that prioritizes protected areas often at the expense of the communities that live in them — toward what Schuijt calls “locally led conservation.”
WWF has implemented nearly all of the 170 reforms recommended by an independent panel it commissioned after the scandal. Among them: grievance mechanisms, risk assessment protocols and an ombuds office. It has also appointed its first Indigenous board member and created a consultative group of Indigenous leaders to advise senior management.
Yet trust, once lost, is slow to rebuild. Critics point out that power over conservation planning remains concentrated in the hands of international actors. Representation, while improved, is not the same as devolution. Schuijt acknowledges the challenges.
“We’re achieving that in some places,” she said, “but still have a long way to go in others.”
That ambivalence reflects a broader tension in conservation: between technocratic ambition and social legitimacy. WWF’s new strategy, Roadmap 2030, recognizes that saving biodiversity requires not only science and funding but the consent and leadership of those who live closest to nature. It also highlights that conservation outcomes cannot be separated from the global economic system.
“Biodiversity loss is being driven by the way we produce and consume food, how we power our economies and how finance flows,” Schuijt said.
WWF remains a large, complex bureaucracy. But in places like Madagascar and Colombia, its rhetoric of change is beginning to translate into action. Whether this signals a structural shift in global conservation or simply institutional adaptation remains to be seen. What is clear is that the future of conservation will be shaped as much by humility as by ambition.
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Banner image: Kirsten Schuijt, director-general of WWF International, during a field visit to local communities in Madagascar. Photo courtesy of WWF Madagascar.
This story first appeared on Mongabay
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