Overview of the Program

Program Overview

The Biodiversity Conservation Network (BCN), a component of the Biodiversity Support Program (BSP), is an innovative USAID-funded program working in the Asia/Pacific Region to provide grants for community-based enterprises that directly depend on biodiversity. BCN has two goals: 1) promoting community-based conservation and 2) testing the hypothesis that if local communities receive sufficient benefits from a biodiversity-linked enterprise, then they will act to conserve it.

Approach

BCN awarded two types of grants through a rigorous, competitive process: Planning Grants and Implementation Grants. The Planning Grants or feasibility study funds, were awarded up until April 1994 to offset the costs of project design. Three-year Implementation Grants were awarded to those groups whose projects met BCN's requirements for potential enterprise viability and the development of monitoring plans to assess the biological, social, and economic impacts of the enterprises.

The overall BCN program was carefully designed to provide the foundation for selecting and supporting multifaceted projects. BCN-funded projects integrate enterprise development with community organization and policy efforts needed to achieve conservation. Key to the program's ultimate success is the collection of social, economic and biological data to measure the effectiveness of these enterprise-oriented, community-based approaches to conservation.

Organization and Funding

The Biodiversity Conservation Network is a 20-million dollar, 6.5-year program initiated in late 1992 with funding from the United States-Asia Environmental Partnership (US-AEP), which is led by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) under cooperative agreement number AEP-0015-A-00-2043-00. The BCN is a USAID attribution to the Global Environmental Facility (GEF). The program is part of the Biodiversity Support Program (BSP), which is implemented by a consortium of World Wildlife Fund, The Nature Conservancy, and World Resources Institute.

US-AEP is a coalition of Asia/Pacific and American businesses, community groups and governmental institutions. The coalition enhances environmental protection and promotes sustainable development in Asia and the Pacific by mobilizing U.S. environmental technology, expertise, and financial resources. US-AEP is supported by a USAID program under the guidance of the inter-agency Trade Promotion Coordinating Committee. USAID's Office of Environment and Natural Resources, Center for the Environment, Bureau for Global Programs, Field Support, and Research now has management responsibility for BCN.

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