Paper short abstract:

What are the possibilities of transnational collaboration between Indigenous and local communities in the Majority World and youth environmentalists in the Minority World? The WTFWWF campaign aims to enact this through the practice of solidarity in resistance for a new paradigm of conservation.

Paper long abstract:

WTFWWF (wtfwwf.org) is a solidarity campaign to visibilise and amplify the message from Indigenous and local communities to decolonize conservation for social justice, biodiversity conservation and to mitigate and adapt to climate change. For decades, the colonial roots, militarisation practices and ecological impacts of colonial conservation’s complicity in unsustainable extractivism have been explored within academia. However, human rights abuses, loss of cultures, and species extinction remain rampant. Crucially, Warren and Baker's 2019 reported for Buzzfeed on WWF's complicity with human rights abuses. WWF International launched an independent panel of experts, whose report in 2020 visibilised the harm, yet cleared WWF staff and staff from partner organisations of responsibility. As fortress conservation becomes increasingly scrutinised by many, the WTFWWF campaign seeks to directly challenge WWF whilst amplifying community-led conservation around the world to a non-academic audience. WTFWWF is co-led in solidarity between the Pan Afrikan Living Cultures Alliance, Gbabandi, Sengwer representatives, the Commission Guarani Yvyrupa and youth environmental activists in the UK. Collaborations are informed by a comprehensive understanding of partners’ local reality and respecting diversity, autonomy and difference in identity, strategy and priorities. Through non-violent direct action, pedagogy and mobilisation, the campaign seeks to contribute to the global and multi-actor efforts to decolonise conservation, bringing WWF to account in the public eye of environmentalists, who are actively funding conservation. Through solidarity, co-creating a fundamentally transformative conservation paradigm that addresses the root causes of the climate and biodiversity crisis, as well as the inequality crisis, based in transnational solidarity against violence.