What is safeguarding and why does it matter for wildlife conservation?
May 19
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Adam Barlow
Quick answer
Safeguarding is the set of policies, practices, and behaviours that conservation organisations use to protect the people they work with from harm caused by their own staff, volunteers, and partners. It is not about protecting biodiversity. It is about protecting people. Conservation fieldwork, community engagement, ranger operations, research, and benefit distribution all create situations in which project staff hold significant power over individuals in communities. Safeguarding is what ensures that power is not abused. Organisations that take it seriously prevent harm from occurring. Those that do not expose vulnerable people to exploitation, lose the trust of the communities they work with, and increasingly find they cannot access funding at all.
Contents
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What does safeguarding mean?
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Why safeguarding is a conservation issue, not just a development one
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A policy is not the same as practice
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What safeguarding requires: five areas of practice
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How safeguarding connects to GEDSI
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FAQ
What does safeguarding mean?
Safeguarding means protecting people from harm that arises from coming into contact with an organisation's staff or programmes. In the conservation and development sectors, it covers two distinct but related areas.
The first is protection from sexual exploitation, abuse, and harassment, often referred to as PSEAH. Sexual exploitation is any actual or attempted abuse of a position of vulnerability, differential power, or trust for sexual purposes. Sexual abuse is physical intrusion of a sexual nature. Sexual harassment is unwelcome sexual conduct directed at a colleague or community member. All three are rooted in the same thing: one person holds more power than another and uses it in a way that causes harm.
The second is child safeguarding, which addresses the specific risks to children who come into contact with an organisation's work, whether as community members, research participants, or the children of staff and partners.
Together, these sit under the umbrella term of safeguarding. The Core Humanitarian Standard (CHS), which most major funders require compliance with, incorporates PSEAH throughout all nine of its accountability commitments. Many large foundations now treat safeguarding compliance as a condition of funding rather than a desirable feature of grant applications.
Why safeguarding is a conservation issue, not just a development one
Conservation organisations sometimes treat safeguarding as something that applies to development NGOs working in humanitarian settings, not to them. This is a mistake.
Conservation fieldwork creates exactly the conditions in which safeguarding failures occur. Staff work in remote locations, often far from organisational oversight, in repeated and sometimes extended contact with community members. They hold significant power over those communities through employment decisions, benefit distribution, land access agreements, and research permissions. A community member who depends on a project for income, for access to traditional resources, or for the continuation of an agreement protecting their land is not in a position to report a staff member who exploits that dependency without fear of consequences. That is the safeguarding risk in conservation, and it is real.
Ecotourism projects bring staff and tourists into communities in ways that can create exploitation risks, particularly for women and young people. Ranger programmes place armed individuals with law enforcement powers in direct authority over the communities they patrol. Research programmes involve collecting personal and biological information from community members. Camera trap networks, drone surveys, and mobile data collection tools capture data about individuals who may not know they have been recorded. Every one of these is a safeguarding risk if the organisation running it does not have specific practices in place to manage it.
The conservation sector was largely absent from the safeguarding reckoning that development organisations went through following the Oxfam Haiti scandal in 2018. That reckoning produced a wave of new funder requirements, sector-wide reporting commitments, and accountability standards. Conservation organisations that have not engaged with that process are now encountering those requirements for the first time through funding applications, and many are not prepared.
A policy is not the same as practice
Most conservation organisations that have thought about safeguarding at all have a policy. Fewer have the practices, systems, and staff capabilities needed to actually deliver what that policy promises.
A safeguarding policy describes what an organisation intends. Practice requires something different: staff who know what behaviours are prohibited and why, recruitment processes that check whether people have prior records of safeguarding violations, reporting mechanisms that community members and staff can actually access and trust, and a leadership culture that takes concerns seriously rather than protecting institutional reputation. Without those things, a safeguarding policy is not safeguarding. It is the appearance of safeguarding.
The pattern is familiar. A project team works hard on community engagement, builds genuine relationships, and believes their safeguarding policy means they are covered. Then a community member approaches an external person to report that a staff member has been demanding sexual favours in exchange for continued employment on the project. There is no internal reporting mechanism the community member trusts. The staff member is popular within the team. Nothing happens. The harm continues. The difference between having a safeguarding policy and practising safeguarding is skill, system, and culture. All three require investment.
What safeguarding requires: five areas of practice
Code of conduct: A safeguarding code of conduct sets out the specific behaviours that are expected of all staff, volunteers, consultants, and partners. It goes beyond general professionalism to address the specific power dynamics of conservation work: what contact with community members is and is not acceptable, how staff should behave when working with children, what relationships between staff and community members are prohibited, how data and photography involving community members must be handled, and what the consequences of violations are. A code of conduct is only effective if everyone working for or on behalf of the organisation has read it, understood it, and confirmed that they will comply with it before beginning work. It needs to be available in the languages of the communities the organisation works with, not just the organisation's operational language.
Safer recruitment: Safer recruitment means checking, before hiring someone, whether they have a prior record of safeguarding violations. The Misconduct Disclosure Scheme, operated by the CHS Alliance, allows organisations to request information from a candidate's previous employers about whether they left due to safeguarding concerns. Reference checks that specifically ask about safeguarding are standard practice in sectors that take this seriously. Safer recruitment also means designing roles, interviews, and probationary periods in ways that reduce the risk of hiring people who will exploit the access their role provides. For roles that involve regular contact with children or community members in isolated settings, the level of scrutiny required is higher.
Reporting and response: A safeguarding reporting mechanism is only useful if the people most at risk of harm can actually access it and trust it. A hotline number in English, available only during office hours, printed in small text on a project information sheet, will not be used by a woman in a remote fishing village who speaks a local language and has no phone credit. Effective reporting requires multiple channels, local languages, accessibility for people with disabilities, and a design that does not expose the person reporting to retaliation. It requires a survivor-centred response process that puts the rights, dignity, and needs of the person who has been harmed above the organisation's interest in managing its reputation. And it requires that staff know what to do when a concern is raised, including how to escalate without compromising confidentiality.
Child-safe programming: Conservation programmes routinely involve children, whether as community members present during field activities, as participants in awareness or education work, as the subjects of research, or simply as people who appear in photographs taken during project visits. Child-safe programming means having clear rules about who can be alone with a child, what photography and data collection involving children requires in terms of consent and storage, how to respond if a child discloses harm, and how to ensure that project activities do not create access or opportunity for people who might harm children. It means applying the best-interests-of-the-child principle to any decision that affects children in the project area.
Risk assessment in project design: Safeguarding risks are not the same in every project. A desk-based policy advocacy project carries different risks from a ranger programme in a remote landscape or a community benefit distribution process in a context of significant gender inequality. Safeguarding risk assessment means identifying, at the design stage, which aspects of the planned work create risk for which groups, and building specific safeguarding measures into the project plan in proportion to those risks. This is where safeguarding and project design connect most directly. A project team that has mapped its stakeholders carefully, assessed the power dynamics between its staff and the communities it works with, and incorporated do-no-harm thinking into its strategy is already doing the analytical work that safeguarding risk assessment requires. What it then needs is the specific safeguarding knowledge to translate that analysis into the right codes of conduct, reporting mechanisms, and response procedures.
How safeguarding connects to GEDSI
Safeguarding and GEDSI are not the same framework, but they address the same underlying condition. Both start from the recognition that some people have less power than others and that this power imbalance creates risk. GEDSI addresses that risk at the structural level, asking how conservation strategies, decisions, and monitoring processes can be designed so that marginalised groups are included and benefit equitably. Safeguarding addresses it at the individual level, asking what prevents a specific staff member from exploiting the specific power they hold over a specific person.
The groups most at risk of safeguarding violations are the same groups GEDSI focuses on. Women, children, people with disabilities, and people who depend economically on the project are the most frequent victim-survivors of exploitation and abuse in conservation and development settings. A project can be designed with strong GEDSI principles and still have poor safeguarding if the individual conduct of staff is not addressed. The two frameworks need each other.
One practical implication of this connection is that safeguarding measures need to be sensitive to GEDSI realities. A reporting mechanism that requires a woman to report a concern to a male line manager, in a context where gender norms make this extremely difficult, is not an effective safeguarding mechanism for women. Safeguarding that is not GEDSI-aware will fail the people most at risk.
Sources: HS Alliance PSEAH Index (2024); Core Humanitarian Standard on Quality and Accountability (2024); CAPSEAH guidance on PSEAH implementation; FCDO safeguarding due diligence standards; DFAT Australian NGO Cooperation Program Manual 2025-26; Safeguarding Resource and Support Hub.
FAQ
Is safeguarding only relevant for organisations working in the Global South?
No. Safeguarding obligations apply wherever an organisation's staff hold power over the people they work with. That includes conservation fieldwork in high-income countries, research programmes, volunteer placements, and any setting where staff interact with children or with communities that depend on the project. The risks may vary in character and scale, but the responsibility to prevent harm and respond to it appropriately does not vary by geography.
How is PSEAH different from safeguarding?
PSEAH (protection from sexual exploitation, abuse, and harassment) is a component of safeguarding, not a separate framework. Safeguarding is the broader term covering all forms of harm that arise from coming into contact with an organisation's staff or programmes. PSEAH specifically addresses harm of a sexual nature. Child safeguarding addresses harm to children. An organisation's safeguarding framework should cover both, alongside other forms of harm such as physical abuse and discrimination.
What is the difference between sexual exploitation and sexual harassment in conservation contexts?
Sexual exploitation involves the abuse of a position of power or trust for sexual purposes, typically where a community member has less power than the staff member. A ranger who conditions continued employment on a community member's compliance with sexual demands is committing sexual exploitation. Sexual harassment typically refers to unwelcome sexual conduct in a workplace context, such as between colleagues. Both are safeguarding violations, though the risk profile and response pathway may differ. Many organisations address them through the same policy framework.
Does safeguarding apply to community members or only to staff?
Both. Safeguarding in the conservation context applies to community members who come into contact with the organisation's programmes and to staff, volunteers, and consultants who may be harmed by colleagues. Sexual harassment between staff members, abuse of power by managers, and harm caused by partners or sub-grantees all fall within an organisation's safeguarding responsibility. Many funders now require organisations to demonstrate safeguarding obligations throughout their partner chain, not just within their own staff.
What should an organisation do first if it has no safeguarding framework at all?
The starting point is a safeguarding policy that clearly defines prohibited behaviours and reporting obligations, combined with a code of conduct that all staff sign before starting work. Neither requires significant resources to produce. From there, the priority is a reporting mechanism that is accessible to community members in local languages, and a commitment from leadership to act on concerns rather than suppress them. The CHS Alliance and the Safeguarding Resource and Support Hub publish free frameworks and tools for organisations at all stages of safeguarding development.
What do funders check when they assess safeguarding compliance?
It varies by funder, but most major bilateral and multilateral funders ask to see a safeguarding or PSEAH policy, evidence that staff have been trained on it, a description of the reporting mechanism available to community members, and records of how any incidents have been handled. Some funders, particularly those aligned with the Core Humanitarian Standard, conduct more detailed assessments covering safer recruitment practices, partner due diligence, and the survivor-centred nature of the response process.
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