Flagship Initiative

Aligning Policy and Finance for Asia’s Protected and Conserved Areas

An ICCF Group Initiative aimed at strengthening the governance and long-term financing of Asia’s protected and conserved areas.

Critical Resources

Asia’s protected and conserved areas are critical to economic resilience, food and water security, and the livelihoods of millions of people, yet many remain inadequately managed and financed. Conservation laws are often disconnected from sectoral policies, institutional mandates overlap, development plans do not sufficiently account for nature, and public budgets are not aligned with conservation commitments.

When conservation policies are aligned with development plans, sectoral laws, institutional mandates, and public budgets, protected areas become more efficiently governed and more credible destinations for public, private, and philanthropic finance.

The ICCF Group flagship initiative supports Asian-led efforts to strengthen this alignment through parliamentary leadership and collaboration among governments, communities, technical organizations, and financing partners.

As the world’s largest archipelagic nation and a globally important marine country, Indonesia provides a strong anchor for a model that can inform wider regional action. The government’s commitment to protect 30 percent of its marine area by 2045 represents one of Asia’s most ambitious marine-conservation agendas.

In PictureHon. G. Budisatrio Djiwandono, Vice Chair of Commission I in the Indonesian House of Representatives (DPR RI) and Co-Chair of Indonesia's Conservation Caucus (Kaukus Konservasi), addresses UK parliamentarians at a hearing supported by ICCF Indonesia. The event brought together the DPR RI Conservation Caucus and the United Kingdom's All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on International Conservation, allowing for a policy dialogue on conservation financing, peatland protection, land use, and inter-parliamentary cooperation.

Delivering this vision will require more than expanding marine protected areas.

It will require coherent governance, sustainable financing, effective management, and meaningful participation by coastal communities.

The initiative focuses on three priorities:

Large-scale marine protected areas Strengthening governance of LSMPAs and connected seascapes to advance the 30 by 45 vision, conserve biodiversity, support sustainable fisheries, and improve coastal resilience.
Collaborative management Clarifying the roles of national and subnational governments, communities, civil society, scientific institutions, and private-sector partners.
Sustainable financing Identifying reforms that can mobilize and deploy resources for management, monitoring, enforcement, restoration, and community participation.

Scaling Policy Solutions Across Southeast Asia

At its 46th General Assembly in 2025 and with support from ICCF Indonesia, parliamentary delegations from nine ASEAN countries, convened through the ASEAN Inter-Parliamentary Assembly (AIPA), adopted the Resolution on Empowering ASEAN Communities through Inter-Parliamentary Cooperation on Green and Blue Economies in ASEAN.

The resolution called on AIPA parliamentarians to harmonize policies and laws, address regulatory gaps, promote knowledge sharing, explore sustainable and innovative finance, and develop a Legislative Handbook on Promoting Green and Blue Economies.

Policy coherence, collaborative management, and sustainable financing

Building on this mandate, the ICCF Group is supporting the development of regional policy dialogue, comparative case studies, legislative guidance, budget and oversight tools, and exchanges among parliamentarians, ministries, communities, experts, and financing institutions.

Country-level marine experiences could provide an initial ASEAN case study on policy coherence, collaborative management, and sustainable financing.

Extending Policy-Coherence Learning Across Asia

The ICCF-supported caucus in Mongolia provides an important pathway for extending this work beyond Southeast Asia and across terrestrial ecosystems. As policy-coherence work in Mongolia advances, emerging lessons on protected-area governance, land-use planning, institutional mandates, sectoral development, and public budgeting will inform the broader Asian approach. These findings will also contribute to protected-area financing work in Indonesia by identifying how conflicting policies, unclear responsibilities, and gaps in planning or budgeting can limit the effectiveness of conservation investment.

Together, experience from marine and terrestrial systems will demonstrate how a common policy-coherence approach can be applied across Asia: from coral reefs and seascapes to grasslands, forests, and terrestrial protected areas.

Connecting Policy, Political Leadership, and Finance

The ICCF Group builds political ownership, identifies policy and financing fragmentation, translates technical findings into legislative and budgetary recommendations, supports practical country-level reforms, and turns national experience into regional parliamentary tools. The initiative strengthens the governance and long-term financing of Asia’s protected and conserved areas by improving alignment across legislation, institutional mandates, development planning, public budgets, and financing mechanisms, helping them deliver lasting benefits for nature, economies, and communities.

More about Our Flagship Initiatives

The ICCF Group’s flagship initiatives advance global stability, U.S. interests, and partner nations’ ability to steward the natural systems that underpin economic resilience and security.

Our Initiatives