- Three years after its launch, the Forests, People, Climate initiative (FPC) still struggles to define what it is, how it differs from the earlier Climate and Land Use Alliance (CLUA), and what practical value it adds beyond donor coordination, argues Chip Fay, Independent Analyst and former Indonesia Country Director, Climate and Land Use Alliance (CLUA).
- Fay contends that the problem is structural rather than communicative: FPC overlays a new coordination framework onto an existing one while retaining donor-centric governance, diffuse accountability, and limited mechanisms for truly integrated grant-making or meaningful Indigenous and local community participation in decision-making.
- Fay says FPC risks becoming “CLUA with broader framing” unless it develops a clearer operational identity, shifts more resources and authority closer to local actors, and adopts a public Common Statement of Purpose that defines its commitments, governance principles, and accountability to Indigenous Peoples and local communities.
- This article is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of Mongabay.
Three years on, the Forests, People, Climate initiative is struggling to say what it is—and why that matters more than anyone wants to admit.
Since the Glasgow Climate Pact’s 2021 pledge to halt and reverse deforestation by 2030, major philanthropic foundations have mobilised billions of dollars behind that commitment. The Climate and Land Use Alliance (CLUA), a collaborative of six philanthropies, pioneered the donor-collaborative approach and subsequently played a central role in creating the larger Forests, People, Climate (FPC) initiative. Together they shape the strategic alignment of some of the world’s largest private climate and land-use grant portfolios—determining which geographies and communities receive support and setting the terms of engagement between international philanthropy and forest-dependent peoples across the tropics. How these players collaborate has direct consequences for whether the global pledge to protect forests is met, and for the hundreds of millions of people whose lands, livelihoods, and futures depend on it.
Over the past two decades, I have had a front-row seat to this evolution. I was there in the early days of CLUA, as we attempted something both pragmatic and ambitious: align strategies without surrendering institutional autonomy. FPC was born out of that lineage, as a recognition that the CLUA model might no longer be sufficient. The urgency of climate change had intensified. Indigenous Peoples and local communities (IPLCs) had moved from the margins to the centre of discourse. And large-scale philanthropic commitments, particularly post-Glasgow, sought new mechanisms to do grant making differently.
Three years on, however, FPC finds itself in a familiar but more acute predicament: struggling to articulate what it is, how it adds value, and why it exists as something distinct from what came before.
The roots of the confusion
The confusion surrounding FPC is not a communications failure. It is structural.
At its core, FPC is still a coordination mechanism layered onto an existing coordination mechanism. It inherits much of its institutional DNA from CLUA—shared funders, overlapping personnel, similar geographies, and a reliance on consensus-driven strategy. Essentially, in its design, it is CLUA 2.0. Yet it has been presented as something new: broader, more inclusive, more IPLC-centred. This creates a persistent tension. Is FPC an effort to rebrand CLUA? A thematic expansion? Or a fundamentally different funding architecture system? In practice, the answer seems “somewhat all three”, which is the problem. For donors, it creates confusion over roles and communication lines. For intermediaries, it can cause confusion in alignment and reporting. For grantees, it raises basic questions about who they are accountable to and under which framework.
I know this confusion—because I lived it. Roughly two years into my six years with CLUA, I surrendered. I stopped correcting civil society partners who described CLUA as a grant-making organisation. I even stopped clarifying confused colleagues—inside and outside the collaborative—that CLUA was not itself a funder; that it was an alliance built on aligned strategy, and that what partners received were CLUA-aligned grants from one or more of its six member foundations.
The distinction mattered for accountability, attribution, and trust. But the confusion was so pervasive, and the correction so repetitive, that I eventually let it go. FPC now faces the same identity problem—only with double the membership and a correspondingly greater potential for that confusion to set in and become something even harder to excise.
The recent move to unify governance between CLUA and FPC is an important step in the right direction. It reduces duplication at the top and clarifies that this is, in effect, a single strategic effort. But it does not resolve the deeper issue: the lack of a clear and differentiated identity.
Part of what makes this hard to solve is a structural reality that rarely gets named directly: very few FPC member foundations are actively seeking funds to increase their grant budgets. The value proposition cannot, therefore, be framed as collective fundraising or expanded capital beyond extending membership. What FPC can credibly offer is community: a community of like-minded institutions, anchored in well-developed common strategies, where the potential for synergistic grant-making is high—grant-making that flows directly to in-country civil society organisations and/or through carefully selected, in-country-aligned intermediaries who understand the political and ecological terrain.
All framework, too little flow?
One of the less-discussed aspects of this evolution is the significant investment in strategy development, analytics, and monitoring systems that has accompanied FPC’s rollout. Institutions such as the ClimateWorks Foundation, the World Resources Institute, and others have played central and expensive roles in developing analytical frameworks, generating country- and global-level strategies, tracking progress on forest and climate indicators, and supporting donor coordination through increasingly sophisticated data systems.
The problem is not the competence of the analysis; it is the translation of strategy into grant making and on-the-ground impact. We now have better maps, clearer theories of change, and more refined prioritisation frameworks. What we do not yet see is a commensurate increase in clarity and scaled-up global and in-country action.
FPC’s yet-to-be-realised potential lies in its ability to generate synergy among members to advance the coherent and ambitious agendas of its three regions and six committees, which address the core challenge of reducing land-based greenhouse gas emissions. The urgency is clear. Local communities face intensifying pressure from state-backed land conversion agendas tied to food security and commodity production. In Indonesia alone, roughly 20 million hectares of forest land have reportedly been identified for potential “food estate” development, much of it overlapping with customary territories, peatlands, and community-managed forests.
At the global level, current climate projections indicate that the world is on a trajectory toward 2°C to 2.7°C of warming by mid-century if emissions reductions and land-sector transitions fail to accelerate.
FPC responses require more than shared frameworks. They need broad-based coordinated grant-making, complementary risk-taking, and long-term commitments that enable members to function as parts of an integrated system rather than as parallel actors moving in similar directions.
A growing reputational risk
There is an additional issue that is becoming harder to ignore: the gap between FPC’s stated identity and its actual governance reality. FPC is described as “a collaborative of philanthropic funders, civil society, and community-based organisations seeking to halt and reverse tropical deforestation while supporting just, sustainable development.” This framing carries a clear implication of joint ownership and equal participation across all participants.
Yet in practice, the difficult-to-change reality is that decision-making authority remains concentrated within philanthropic institutions. Civil society organisations are not coequals in governance. Indigenous Peoples and local communities are primarily recipients of funding and programmatic design, rather than participants in structuring capital flows or setting strategic directions. A useful challenge for FPC would be to list its civil society collaborators and see how many are familiar with FPC—and, for those who are, how many can accurately describe it.
When an initiative presents itself as a multi-actor collaboration but operates through a donor-centric governance model, it risks overstating the degree of participation, blurring the distinction between consultation and decision-making, and eroding trust with precisely those actors it seeks to empower. IPLC organisations are increasingly sophisticated actors, and they can distinguish between participation in implementation and participation in governance. If FPC continues to use language that implies the latter without structurally delivering it, it risks reputational dilution across the very constituencies it is intended to support.
The core design constraint
The fundamental constraint has not changed from the early CLUA days: members want alignment, but, understandably, they do not want to relinquish control over allocation. FPC attempts to square that circle by creating shared strategies but with not yet adequate mechanisms for achieving the elusive synergy among member grant making. The result is predictable—diffuse accountability, slow execution, and uneven adoption of collective priorities. The recent unification of governance helps, as it clarifies leadership roles, but the underlaying reality is that the original vision remains underrealized.
What FPC needs
If FPC is to justify its existence beyond an incremental evolution of CLUA, it will benefit from:
Defining a clear identity—one that answers, in plain terms, what FPC does that no individual foundation, or CLUA itself, cannot do. This cannot be a generic statement about “alignment” or “collaboration.” It needs to be operational.
Articulating a real value proposition for members—something tangible that changes how members behave, not just how they communicate. Better coordination and shared learning are not enough.
Shifting from strategy production to meaningful and broad-based resource deployment. This means increasing the proportion of funds that are pooled or delegated, empowering local intermediaries with real decision-making authority, and reducing the distance between donor intent and community-level action.
Start with a common statement of purpose
Before any of this can happen, FPC needs to answer a more fundamental question: what does it actually stand for? Not in the language of strategy documents and theories of change—but in plain, public, accountable terms that members, partners, grantees, and IPLC organisations can all read and hold FPC to.
The instrument for that can be a Common Statement of Purpose. Not a mission statement polished by a communications team, and not another framework document—but a short, direct declaration of identity, values, and intent that members collectively author and publicly sign. One that names the communities FPC exists to serve, the governance challenges it commits to address, and the standard by which it is willing to be judged.
The value of a Common Statement of Purpose is that it is hard to walk back. A strategy document can be revised quietly; a public commitment, signed by member institutions, creates accountability that internal processes cannot. It also forces the conversation that FPC has so far avoided: what do we actually agree on, and what are we willing to say out loud? The process of producing a Common Statement of Purpose—negotiating its language, determining who signs it, deciding whether civil society and IPLC organisations co-sign alongside philanthropic members—would itself reveal where fractures lie.
A Common Statement of Purpose would not resolve FPC’s structural constraints. Member will still control their capital; governance will still be imperfect. But it would establish a normative foundation—a public record of what FPC claims to be—against which progress can be measured and accountability can be assessed. It is, in the end, the precondition for everything else on this list.
A final reflection
There is no question that the intent behind FPC is both visionary and timely. The recognition that Indigenous Peoples and local communities must be at the centre of forest and climate solutions is one of the most important shifts in this field over the past decade.
But intent is not enough. Structure matters. Incentives matter. Identity matters.
FPC now sits at a crossroads. It can continue as a well-intentioned but ambiguous overlay on an existing system. Or it can make the transition to a disciplined mechanism that aligns not only strategy, but authority and accountability. The difference between those paths will determine whether FPC finds its stride or simply becomes CLUA with a broader framing and higher expectations than it can structurally deliver.
Chip Fay served as the first Country Director for Indonesia at the Climate and Land Use Alliance (CLUA). He is a former Program Officer of the Ford Foundation, Special Advisor to the Secretary General of the Alliance of Indigenous Peoples of the Indonesian Archipelago (AMAN) and a Founding Fellow at the Samdhana Institute, where he works on Indigenous rights, forest governance, and climate policy in Southeast Asia. The views expressed here are solely his own.
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