Richard Margoluis

Using conceptual models as a planning and evaluation tool in conservation

Conservation projects are dynamic interventions that occur in complex contexts involving intricate interactions of social, political, economic, cultural, and environmental factors. These factors are constantly changing over time and space as managers learn more about the context within which they work. This complex context poses challenges for planning and evaluating conservation project. In order for conservation managers and evaluation professionals to design good interventions and measure project success, they simultaneously need to embrace and deconstruct contextual complexity. In this article, we describe conceptual models--a tool that helps articulate and make explicit assumptions about a projects context and what a project team hopes to achieve. We provide real-world examples of conceptual models, discuss the relationship between conceptual models and other evaluation tools, and describe various ways that conceptual models serve as a key planning and evaluation tool. These include, for example, that they document assumptions about a project site and they provide a basis for analyzing theories of change. It is impractical to believe that we can completely eliminate detail or dynamic complexity in projects. Nevertheless, conceptual models can help reduce the effects of this complexity by helping us understand it.

Results Chains: a Tool for Conservation Action Design, Management, and Evaluation

Every day, the challenges to achieving conservation grow. Threats to species, habitats, and ecosystems multiply and intensify. The conservation community has invested decades of resources and hard work to reduce or eliminate these threats. However, it struggles to demonstrate that its efforts are having an impact. In recent years, conservation project managers, teams, and organizations have found themselves under increasing pressure to demonstrate measurable impacts that can be attributed to their actions. To do so, they need to answer three important questions: (1) Are we achieving our desired impact?; (2) Have we selected the best interventions to achieve our desired impact?; and (3) Are we executing our interventions in the best possible manner? We describe results chains, an important tool for helping teams clearly specify their theory of change behind the actions they are implementing. Results chains help teams make their assumptions behind an action explicit and positions the team to develop relevant objectives and indicators to monitor and evaluate whether their actions are having the intended impact. We describe this tool and how it is designed to tackle the three main questions above. We also discuss the purposes for which results chains have been used and the implications of their use. By using results chains, the conservation community can learn, adapt, and improve at a faster pace and, consequently, better address the ongoing threats to species, habitats, and ecosystems.

What Conservation Can Learn from Other Fields about Monitoring and Evaluation

T field of conservation suffers from having no common approaches for measuring bottom-line success, describing the assumptions made by practitioners, comparing projects’ effectiveness and efficiency, and capturing learning. As a result, managers and practitioners are limited in their ability to learn from one another, and donors question the value of their investments. In this respect, the conservation sector affords interesting parallels with some other fields during their formative years. For example, in the early days of capitalism in the 1700s and 1800s, most managers and investors faced a crippling lack of financial information. Managers typically did not monitor the progress of their companies in any systematic fashion. Unless they had access to inside information, investors had no way of comparing the prospective risks and rewards of investing in different companies. At best, financial data were presented in incomparable formats, and at worst, they were fabrications. To make sound business decisions about a given firm, a manager or financial investor needs some basic information. At a minimum, this includes current and expected future bottom-line profits, the line items and assumptions involved in calculating these profits, the firm’s assets and liabilities, and the firm’s business plan. It also helps to have a general understanding of the progress and prospects within the industrial sector in which the firm operates. Beginning in the mid-1800s, some public companies began to present their information in a standardized fashion and to hire independent accounting firms to audit their books and certify that the information was accurate. Although participation was initially voluntary, those firms that provided better information began to attract investors preferentially. Over time, the system became institutionalized and was regulated by government agencies. Nevertheless, even today the system is far from perfect; the corporate accounting scandals that have dominated the news and financial pages over the past year have once again highlighted the problems that managers and investors face when confronted with inaccurate or misleading information. A lack of information has also caused problems for nonprofit organizations. Starting in the 1950s and 1960s, managers in a wide range of fields, including international development, public health, education, and social services, began to realize that they also needed better information. This was essential for making intelligent decisions about deploying scarce resources and for convincing governments and donor organizations that the nonprofits were effective and thus represented a good investment. To this end, far-sighted organizations in these fields began to develop monitoring and evaluation (M&E) approaches to obtain the information they needed. Conservation practitioners can benefit from the experience gained in these fields. To this end, Foundations of Success, in partnership with the Wildlife Conservation Society and Conservation International and with support from the Moore Foundation, has undertaken a systematic survey of how M&E is done in a variety of fields, including business, development, public health, education, and social services as well as conservation. We analyzed more than 200 different publications and distilled the ideas they contained into some basic lessons that could inform M&E in conservation. One major lesson that emerges is that the development of M&E approaches in all of these fields has gone through a roughly parallel evolutionary process. Most fields began with external “summative” evaluations of the merit or worth of a completed project or program. Over time, each field added more participatory “formative” evaluations that took place periodically during the life of the program or project; these evaluations were designed to help improve the program or the production process. Finally, in each field, organizations began to integrate evaluation into an iterative project or program cycle designed to promote learning and adaptive management. In conservation, this means that we cannot treat evaluation as a one-off event; instead, we need to build it into our systems for designing, managing, and monitoring projects and programs. Another lesson is that effective M&E cannot focus just on the outcome. M&E also has to consider the intervention being conducted and the various independent variables that affect the outcome. In the financial world, this means focusing not just on the bottom-line profit or loss figure but also on obtaining information about the costs of inputs, the amount of sales, and the production process. In conservation, this means that we cannot merely focus on What Conservation Can Learn from Other Fields about Monitoring and Evaluation

Black swans, cognition and the power of learning from failure.

Failure carries undeniable stigma and is difficult to confront for individuals, teams, and organizations. Disciplines such as commercial and military aviation, medicine, and business have long histories of grappling with it, beginning with the recognition that failure is inevitable in every human endeavor. Although conservation may arguably be more complex, conservation professionals can draw on the research and experience of these other disciplines to institutionalize activities and attitudes that foster learning from failure, whether they are minor setbacks or major disasters. Understanding the role of individual cognitive biases, team psychological safety, and organizational willingness to support critical self-examination all contribute to creating a cultural shift in conservation to one that is open to the learning opportunity that failure provides. This new approach to managing failure is a necessary next step in the evolution of conservation effectiveness.