The Role of Intermediaries in Enabling Direct Funding for Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities: Reflections From the Practice of Rainforest Foundation US

Abstract

Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPs and LCs) receive less than 1% of international climate finance. Most of it arrives through intermediary organizations whose role has been increasingly questioned. This article examines four partnerships in which Rainforest Foundation US (RFUS) acted as an intermediary between donors and IP and LC organizations: long-term partnerships in Guyana, fiscal sponsorship of the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities, bilateral funding channeled to the Mesoamerican Alliance of Peoples and Forests, and an Indigenous-government collaboration for land titling in Peru. Through internal reflection, we ask what helped open pathways toward direct funding and where that work hit its limits. Three patterns emerge: arrangements built around partners’ funding structures and institutional moments rather than a single model; a distinction between administrative capacity and the political-institutional capacities IP and LC organizations already hold; and the use of institutional position to redistribute, rather than concentrate, access to donors. Direct and intermediated funding form a continuum of complementary pathways, and intermediation can advance direct access when it is deliberately transitional and supports the consolidation of IP- and LC-led financing mechanisms.