Communicating Environmental Protection

Rationalizing communication approaches to fit stakeholder needs, interests, and access is crucial for multi-stakeholder projects covering different national, district, and local levels. This report discusses in detail the key communication approaches used by the Coral Reef Rehabilitation and Management Project Phase II in Indonesia, and why it pays to integrate communication as early in project design as possible.

Communicating Environmental Protection

Communication strategies used by the Coral Reef Rehabilitation and Management Project Phase II in Indonesia helped shift villagers’ destructive fishing behavior and poor waste disposal toward a community-based effort to manage resources, and still economically benefit from environmental protection. Communication approaches engaged national and local stakeholders with conflicting interests and needs, and used social mobilization and advocacy to get various groups—women, youth, academe, and civil society—to monitor and sustain project gains.

Highway in the Mountains: The Western Yunnan Roads Development Project

Yunnan is a remote, mountainous province in the Peoples’ Republic of China (PRC). Many of its residents are from poor, minority groups that rely on subsistence farming. Lack of connectivity exacerbates their poverty.

In 2003, PRC, with assistance from the Asian Development Bank, launched the Western Yunnan Roads Development Project, which aimed to connect Western Yunnan to the country’s regional centers and to the Greater Mekong Subregion.