Practitioner Guidance from a Decade of CARE-WWF Alliance Experience

Ecosystems & Nature-based Solutions

Integrating Approaches to Deliver Conservation and Development Impacts at Scale

The CARE-WWF Alliance is a pioneering partnership with deep experience implementing integrated conservation and development programs. Formed in 2008, the global partnership aims to empower the poor, especially women, and positively transform their lives and livelihoods, while protecting and restoring healthy, resilient ecosystems.

In the last decade, the Alliance helped communities in Mozambique, Tanzania, and Nepal to develop and execute complementary strategies that create sustainable livelihoods and conserve natural resources and ecosystems.

In Mozambique, the Alliance worked with local communities to better manage coastal ecosystems where fisheries, mangrove forests, and smallholder agriculture support subsistence livelihoods. In Tanzania, the Alliance has empowered rural communities dependent on forests and smallholder agriculture systems with new practices that enable them to generate and save more income and better plan use and demand accountability around land and water resource management. In Nepal, CARE and WWF have partnered with local and national organizations in a long-term initiative that continues to build resilience to climate change in vulnerable communities and critical ecosystems.

Sustainable landscape experts, EcoAgriculture Partners, reviewed these three Alliance projects and interviewed key staff and stakeholders to capture lessons learned and approaches for integrating conservation and development at scale. This brief synthesizes the principles that underpin the Alliance’s approach and offers practitioners two frameworks, containing strategies for integration cross-sectoral interventions and scaling up impacts, respectively.