What we do

Canopy Watch Up Close

At Canopy Watch, we recognize how easy it is to become disenfranchised from a complicated procedural process. The escape route is often designed to intimidate, confuse, and frustrate those left in its wake.

We aim to empower communities with essential tools to facilitate their endeavors for dispute remedy. Our assistance often starts with basic IT training. We then document, digitize, archive the materials used as paper doesn’t store well in Papua New Guinea. At professional workshops for community groups, recognizing that not everyone can attend and that presentations are often complicated, we record the workshop as reference tools for customary landowners and community-based organisations to refer back to in their own time. Access to professional assistance is expensive and often difficult to find.

We listen to the difficulties and miss understandings experienced and set up interviews with common questions to experts who can answer them clearly and concisely.

There are no fast fixes. However, we try to extend our presence to allow customary landowners to share their failures and successes and avoid procedural duplications that often form part of the defenses shielding the escape route. At the workshop, we share the materials gathered to assist and explain the process. We present and discuss a visual process map of the procedures and decision directions, allowing further understanding for communities to recognize where they are in the process.

We listen and record a statement from participants whenever possible; their vocalization is an essential aspect of empowerment by listening and sharing. Places that are over the hills and far away then become accessible to international NGOs and Media. To make sure the voice of a distance community is available to be heard in it’s our frame of reference.