Community-led Economies & Markets Global Advisor

Benefits

Additional Information

What We Can Achieve Together Within TNC's Office of Equitable Conservation, which sits in the Chief Conservation Office, the Community-led Economies & Finance (CLEF) team works to ensure that Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and smallholders are at the center of the economic and financial systems that affect their lands, waters, and livelihoods. Grounded in TNC's Voice, Choice, and Action (VCA) Framework and Human Rights Guide, the team operates across two integrated orientations: building community-led value through enterprises and markets and enabling community-controlled resources through reformed and inclusive financial mechanisms. These orientations are inseparable, and both rest on a foundation of self-determination. This role serves as the team's senior technical strategist for community-led economies, enterprises, and market systems. Reporting to the Director of Community-led Economies & Finance, it shapes the team's approach to growing regenerative, community-controlled economic activity - bringing both the analytical rigor of an economist (systems thinking, incentive design, cost-benefit analysis, macro framing) and the practical expertise of someone who has worked on enterprise development, value chains, and market linkages. This is not a desk-based strategy role. It requires close collaboration with regional, local, and global teams who drive implementation and manage relationships on the ground, with deference to local leadership. The relationship is deeply bidirectional and anchored in trust-building and right relations: some of the most innovative thinking around enterprise ecosystems, regenerative livelihoods, and conservation-linked economies is emerging directly from regional programs. The global role identifies replicable models across geographies, co-develops frameworks with regional teams, facilitates cross-regional learning, and connects regional innovations to global platforms and partnerships. While economies and markets are the primary domain, this position also contributes to the team's finance work where economic and enterprise expertise is needed - for example, analyzing the financial viability of community enterprises, informing investment pathway design, or advising on how enterprise support and financial inclusion strategies connect. This cross-pollination is by design: the team does not separate economic and financial work into silos. The position is globally remote within countries where TNC has an established office. It requires a flexible schedule to collaborate across time zones (Pacific through East Africa) and a willingness to travel internationally (approximately 20-25%). We're Looking for You CLEF works at the intersection of conservation, community rights, and economic systems - advancing regenerative, nature-positive economies that provide communities with sustainable alternatives to extractive land use. The landscapes where TNC works on natural climate solutions depend on communities being economically empowered. We need someone who thinks like an economist and acts like a practitioner - someone who can analyze why an economic system produces certain outcomes for communities and ecosystems, and then co-design interventions that shift those outcomes. You bring deep expertise in community economic development, market systems, or enterprise support, and you've worked directly with or in service to Indigenous Peoples and local communities. You understand how to design landscape-level enterprise support ecosystems that work with all the actors whose participation is needed to unlock change. A signature initiative you'll help advance is the team's Community Enterprise Catalyst approach - a systemic model for unlocking community-led enterprise development across multiple landscapes. You're as comfortable analyzing PES incentive structures and conducting cost-benefit analysis as you are co-developing market strategies with regional leads and managing relationships with specialized business development service providers. Key responsibilities include: Strategy & Technical Leadership - Advance and co-develop the team's strategic approach to community-led economies in collaboration with regional, local, and global teams - grounded in Indigenous rights, self-determination, community ownership, and equitable market relations. - Bring economic analysis to the team's work: diagnosing why economic systems produce the outcomes they do for communities and ecosystems, analyzing incentive structures and enabling conditions, conducting cost-benefit and feasibility analyses, and applying macro-level framing to inform where and how the team intervenes. - Design landscape-level enterprise support ecosystems in collaboration with regional leads: mapping the actors needed to unlock change (communities, buyers, investors, business development service providers, government), conducting value chain analyses and livelihood diagnostics, identifying nature-positive value chains, and