This report focuses on grant management in five BSP grantgiving programs. Our study of each yielded practical lessons regarding grantee selection criteria and processes, individual and institutional capacity building, mentoring, field presence, networking, and monitoring and evaluation. This report groups these BSP grantgiving programs into three sections according to certain principal distinguishing characteristics: two programs that awarded individual applied research grants (CIG and Ukrainian grants program), two that use directed grantgiving as a component of more comprehensive strategic conservation programs (CARPE-SOS and KEMALA), and one that carried out conservation-oriented hypothesis testing through its grant portfolio (BCN). In practice these categories are not rigid. For example, BCN's hypothesis-testing grants supported applied research, as do many of the CARPE-SOS and KEMALA grants. The Ukrainian grants program, while supporting individual projects, also worked to strengthen Ukraine's conservation community as a whole. Also, as these profiles reflect, there are at least as many differences as similarities between the CIG and Ukrainian programs or the CARPE and KEMALA programs.
The BSP grant managers we interviewed for this study had many insights into developing and managing successful grants programs. We asked these project managers, "If you could tell our readers the five most important lessons that you learned as a grant manager, what would they be?" Their responses to this question—in their own words—are included throughout the document and entitled, "Words from the Wise." In fact, many BSP grant managers felt that they had so much they wanted to share that we could not limit them to just their five top lessons-learned!
The descriptive portion of this study is divided into three main sections:
Both the worldwide Conservation Impact Grants (CIG) program and the Ukraine Conservation Initiatives Grants Program competitively awarded small grants to individuals and institutions involved in research and conservation-oriented activities. CIG invested in improving research capacity in developing countries, supporting applied field-based research relevant to biodiversity conservation. The Ukrainian grants program facilitated application of earlier scientific research results to projects aimed towards specific action for biodiversity conservation impact.
The Central Africa Regional Program for the Environment (CARPE) gives grants through BSP/CARPE's CARPE-SOS (Strategic Objective Support) fund to support partners in information gathering and dissemination and in conservation-oriented activities directly addressing CARPE's programmatic objectives. These relate to CARPE's overall strategic objective of long-term conservation and sustainable use of the Congo Basin's natural resources. These grants also promote capacity strengthening and development of African individuals and institutions and strengthening of linkages between U.S.-based and African partners, and they fill gaps in USAID funding allocations to other CARPE endeavors.
Through KEMALA, the "Community Natural Resource Managers' Program," BSP's Asia/Pacific program provides ongoing funding, as well as technical and networking support to link individuals and organizations concerned with traditional community-based natural resource management across Indonesia, to help build coalitions that are well informed, technically competent, creative, and politically active. KEMALA supports the strengthening of local and national NGOs that can contribute to improved biological resource management and conservation "best practices" and nurtures the growth of decentralized democratic structures within which groups can participate in decision making now and in future decades. KEMALA partners are groups with effective track records related to these attributes and objectives.
Also in the Asia/Pacific region, the Biodiversity Conservation Network (BCN) funded planning and implementation grants in a hypothesis-testing program designed to support enterprise-oriented approaches to biodiversity conservation and to evaluate their effectiveness. BCN supported community-based enterprises directly dependent on biodiversity conservation to test the BCN hypothesis that if local communities received sufficient benefits from a biodiversity-linked enterprise, they would act to conserve the resources on which it depends.