Harnessing Place-based Expertise in a Growing Team: Introducing Planet Indonesia’s Fieldnote System

By Paul Thung

This year’s UN biodiversity conference (COP16) achieved important progress in recognizing and expanding the crucial roles of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs), reflecting a growing agreement in the global conservation community about the need for inclusive and equitable approaches. Centering IPLCs and social justice is especially necessary now, as conservation is being scaled up to address the magnitude of the threats to biodiversity. 

At Planet Indonesia, we know about the challenges associated with trying to scale up conservation while centering local leadership. As our organization grows, we’re having to translate our core values into effective organizational structures and practices. How, for example, can we continue to practice radical listening while operating in an increasing number of diverse and complex landscapes? In this blog post, we’re excited to introduce one of our latest innovations: a system to make valuable insights from the field teams available to the organization as a whole. 

Whose expertise counts?

Charles (left), a member of the Field Division, and a community member sit on a veranda together.

Let’s start by illustrating the challenge. After an official community meeting, Adam (our co-founder and executive director), I, and other colleagues were invited to chat in the kitchen, where the conversation turned to the white-rumped shama (Copsychus malabaricus). This passerine bird, controversially stripped of legal protection in Indonesia in 2018, has vanished from many Bornean villages due to its popularity in the songbird trade. In this community, however, customary leaders had taken proactive steps to protect the species, creating and successfully enforcing a ban on capturing or killing the white-rumped shama. Adam was amazed. This was an inspiring example of community leadership in conservation - but why had he never heard about it before?

To understand this question, you need to know that Planet Indonesia’s program implementation teams are split into a Field Division and a Technical Division. Field teams work in specific sites and spend one to two weeks each month directly engaging with village partners. Technical teams specialize in programs such as Sustainable Fisheries or Financial Security to ensure consistent implementation, monitoring, and evaluation across sites. While technical team members tend to be older, more highly educated, and more experienced, the expertise of field teams is equally, if not more, crucial. As frontline conservation workers, we rely on them to understand the lived realities of our village partners. 

However, as we discovered in that kitchen, crucial insights into local dynamics and opportunities sometimes fail to surface. This could be due to several reasons: perhaps field staff don’t observe important issues, or they don’t report their observations to colleagues, or there is insufficient organizational follow-up on reports from the field. We designed the fieldnote system to address those potential gaps.

How it works

Every month, field staff write a short story about something they have observed or learned during their work. The topics are entirely up to them. Fieldnotes have covered a diverse range of issues, from the poor condition of roads in the rainy season to a new type of mushroom that people started collecting in a forest to requests by forest patrol team members to get Sundays off so they can go to Church. Back in the office, field staff engage in a monthly reflection meeting with their area manager and one or more representatives of the technical team. Together, they discuss the issues raised, explore their implications, and, if necessary, define follow-up plans.

Small convenience shops like these are places where people meet and the latest gossip is exchanged.

Follow-up can be as simple as sharing the story with other colleagues. Other times, it involves much more. For example, one fieldnote revealed that a community-based organization supported by Planet Indonesia had borrowed its name from a sacred site far upriver. Concerned about not having sought permission to use the name, the organization’s leaders planned a ritual at the sacred site to rectify this. During the reflection meeting, the team recognized the importance of this initiative. They used the fieldnote as evidence to secure management approval to participate in the ritual, providing both practical and symbolic support to our village partners.

Results so far

Field facilitators frequently travel long distances on rugged terrain to engage with community partners.

Our database now contains over 130 stories. An internal survey with 53 staff members reveals that there is wide organizational support for continuing the fieldnote system, with almost all staff indicating that it improves or strongly improves organizational performance. Encouragingly, of the 28 field team members who filled out the survey, those with significant fieldnote experience (having written 11-20 fieldnotes) gave much higher ratings to their individual capacity and to their team’s performance (in terms of responding to local dynamics and collecting qualitative data on impacts), compared to field staff with less or no fieldnote experience (see figure below).

Responses of field team members (n=28) to an internal survey evaluating the fieldnote system.

Looking ahead

Encouraged by these results, we are rolling out the fieldnote system to all our field teams. As we refine and streamline the associated procedures, we’re also exploring new ways of using the insights it generates. First, we aim to improve organizational responsiveness by developing more efficient follow-up processes for the issues raised in fieldnotes. Second, we’re working to enhance internal learning by (a) involving more technical team members in reflection meetings and (b) increasing internal readership of our Fieldnotes Bulletins (Buletin Jejak Lapangan), which currently reach an estimated 65% of our staff. Lastly, we’re planning to share selected stories with a wider audience through blogposts and an ArcGIS Storymap - watch this space for more news on that!

Despite the important progress made at COP16, the lack of consensus on critical issues such as funding strategies and monitoring frameworks left many feeling worried about the future. By sharing stories from the field, we hope to offer some reassurance that meaningful work is happening every day in communities and landscapes around the world. 

We also hope to inspire others to elevate place-based expertise within their organizations, ensuring it informs both action and strategy. If you have comments, questions, or ideas, we’d love to hear from you.

If you have any questions please reach out via admin@planetindonesia.org. Sign up for our newsletter and follow us on our social media Facebook here, Instagram here, and LinkedIn here to get timely updates on our activities, an insider’s look into the lives of front-line conservationists, and ongoing programs.