Sustaining conservation finance: Future directions for the Bhutan Trust Fund for Environmental Conservation

The Bhutan Trust Fund for Environmental Conservation (BTFEC) was established in 1991 as a sustainable, domestic funding source for Bhutan's environmental programmes. Almost a decade after its inception, the trust fund has spent US$1.66 million against an accumulated capital base of US$34.71 million. Grant making is guided by five-year funding objectives, focusing on conservation of biological diversity and promoting both government and non-government human capacity to manage the projects. However, there is no framework in place to strategically address new and emerging environmental issues, particularly the ecological stress factors from rapidly increasing basic human needs arising out of growing urban demographics, and the impacts of geo-politics and globalisation. This paper discusses three scenarios for the future direction of the trust fund in Bhutan: as a financier of the government's recurrent costs of conservation; as an autonomous parastatal conservation agency; and as an independent grant maker guided by strategic five-year planning cycles. These scenarios are evaluated for their potential to fulfill the trust fund's social welfare mandate, as well as their possible contribution to gross national happiness (GNH), based on quantitative parameters established through a conceptual predictive model (Namgyal and Wangchuk, 1999) to measure the social and environmental well-being of Bhutan.