Measures of Success: Designing, Managing, and Monitoring Conservation and Development Projects

By Nick Salafsky, Richard A. Margoluis and Anna Balla

Measures of Success is a practical, hands-on guide to designing, managing, and measuring the impacts of community-oriented conservation and development projects. It presents a simple, clear, logical, and yet comprehensive approach to developing and implementing effective programs, and can help conservation and development practitioners use principles of adaptive management to test assumptions about their projects and learn from the results.

The book presents a systematic approach to improving the focus, effectiveness, and efficiency of projects, with specific guidelines and advice on:

• designing a realistic conceptual framework based on local site conditions
• developing clearly defined goals, objectives, and activities
• creating a monitoring plan that can be used to assess whether goals and objectives are being met
• integrating social and biological science techniques to collect the most relevant and useful data in the most cost-effective way
• using the information obtained through the monitoring plan to modify the project and learn from the result

The text is developed in eight chapters that follow the structure of a planning process from conception to completion, with the chapters linked by four scenarios that serve as teaching case studies throughout the book. Examples from these scenarios illustrate the processes and tools discussed, and each scenario case study is presented in its entirety in an appendix to the volume. The approach has been developed and field tested by practitioners working in many different projects in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and their experience and input ensure that the guide is both practical and useful.

Measures of Success is the only work of its kind currently available, and represents an invaluable resource for field-based practitioners, project managers, and local community leaders, as well as for international NGO staff, college and university teachers and students, researchers, and government officials.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Mar 6, 2013
• ISBN: 9781597263276

Book preview

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About Island Press

Island Press is the only nonprofit organization in the United States whose principal purpose is the publication of books on environmental issues and natural resource management. We provide solutions-oriented information to professionals, public officials, business and community leaders, and concerned citizens who are shaping responses to environmental problems.

In 1998, Island Press celebrates its fourteenth anniversary as the leading provider of timely and practical books that take a multidisciplinary approach to critical environmental concerns. Our growing list of titles reflects our commitment to bringing the best of an expanding body of literature to the environmental community throughout North America and the world.

Support for Island Press is provided by The Jenifer Altman Foundation, The Bullitt Foundation, The Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, The Nathan Cummings Foundation, The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, The Charles Engelhard Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The Vira I. Heinz Endowment, The W. Alton Jones Foundation, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, The Curtis and Edith Munson Foundation, The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, The National Science Foundation, The New-Land Foundation, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, The Surdna Foundation, The Winslow Foundation, The Pew Charitable Trusts, and individual donors.

About the Biodiversity Support Program

The Biodiversity Support Program (BSP) is a consortium of World Wildlife Fund (WWF), The Nature Conservancy (TNC), and World Resources Institute (WRI) funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

BSP’s mission is to promote conservation of the world’s biological diversity. We believe that a healthy and secure living resource base is essential to meet the needs and aspirations of present and future generations. To accomplish our mission, we support local communities, nongovernmental organizations, and governments to establish:

Clear conservation priorities, goals, and objectives;

Democratic social processes, dialogue, and partnerships that lead to conservation;

Ethical valuation of nature;

Favorable policies that promote conservation of biodiversity; and

Enhanced awareness and knowledge about conservation.

BSP’s approach focuses on the integration of conservation with social and economic development through implementation of projects, research and analysis of conservation and development approaches, and information exchange and outreach.

Partial support for the preparation of the manuscript was provided by the Global Bureau of USAID under the terms of project numbers DHR-5554-A-00-8044-00 and AEP-0015-A-00-2403-00. The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Biodiversity Support Program, its consortium members (WWF, TNC, and WRI), or USAID.

Measures of Success

Designing, Managing, and Monitoring Conservation and Development Projects

Nick Salafsky

Richard A. Margoluis

Anna Balla

Copyright ©1998 by Richard A. Margoluis and

Niklaus N. Salafsky.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

Any part of this book, including the illustrations, may be copied, reproduced, or adapted to meet local needs in developing countries provided:

1. permission is obtained from Island Press;

2. the parts reproduced are distributed free of charge or at cost—not for profit; and

3. credit is given to the original work.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means for commercial ends without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 1718 Connecticut Avenue, N.W., Suite 300, Washington, DC 20009, USA. Fax: [phone].

ISLAND PRESS is a trademark of The Center for Resource Economics.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Margoluis, Richard.

Measures of success : designing, managing, and monitoring conservation and development projects / Richard Margoluis and Nick Salafsky ; illustrations by Anna Balla. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

9781597263276

1. Biological diversity conservation. 2. Conservation projects (Natural resources) I. Salafsky, Nick. II. Title.

QH75.M328 1998 333.95’16—dc21

98–13588

CIP

Printed on recycled, acid-free paper e9781597263276_i0002.jpg

Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8

To our teachers past and present.

Table of Contents

About Island Press

About the Biodiversity Support Program

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Preface

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1 - Introduction

Chapter 2 - Clarify Group’s Mission

Chapter 3 - Design a Conceptual Model Based on Local Site Conditions

Chapter 4 - Develop a Management Plan: Goals, Objectives, Activities

Chapter 5 - Develop a Monitoring Plan

Chapter 6 - Implement Management and Monitoring Plans

Chapter 7 - Analyze Data and Communicate Results

Chapter 8 - Use Results to Adapt and Learn

Appendix A - Project Plans for Scenarios

Appendix B - Glossary of Select Terms

Index

About the Authors

Island Press Board of Directors

Preface

Audience for This Guide

Measures of Success is a guide to designing, managing, and monitoring the impacts of conservation and development projects. Some people believe that these are difficult tasks that only people with advanced academic training and degrees can do. We believe, however, that the people who are most qualified to do this work are the conservation practitioners and community stakeholders who are most familiar with local conditions. This guide is written for them.

If you are part of a conservation and development effort, then the systematic approach presented in this guide can help you design a new project or improve an existing one. If you are part of a group that supports field staff in project design, implementation, or evaluation, then this guide will provide you with some basic tools to assist you in your work. Other people who might find this guide useful include government officials, policy and decision makers, donors, researchers, and students.

Finally, although this guide was written for conservation and development projects, the approach can be easily adapted for use by projects in other related fields such as community development, public health, and education.

Roots of This Guide

In our jobs with the Biodiversity Support Program (BSP), we work closely with local project partners to help them design and implement monitoring strategies for their projects. In doing this work, we found that a common constraint to doing good monitoring is that the people responsible for actually carrying out monitoring activities are frequently not the people who designed the original project. Instead, design and management are often split apart from monitoring and treated as separate processes.

Our experiences convinced us, however, that project design, management, and monitoring cannot be separated. Thus, although we set out initially to write a guide focusing only on project monitoring, we realized that we could not do so without first discussing project design and management in a systematic fashion. And so we expanded our scope to cover these topics, finding a wealth of existing information that we could use as a starting point for our efforts. As shown in the diagram below, the approach presented in this guide is based on many different sources.

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The theoretical sources for this guide lie in the extensive existing body of work on project design and management. The materials presented in this guide draw on many related project management approaches such as the strategic planning and managing for results techniques developed by business experts in the 1970s and 1980s. They also draw on a number of existing project design frameworks such as the logframe analysis used by many project developers, the results framework approach that has recently been established by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the ZOPP method used by the German Gesellschaft fur Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ). In addition, the approach also draws on the concepts of adaptive management, a process originally developed to manage natural resources in large-scale ecosystems by deliberate experimentation and systematic monitoring of the results. All of these approaches themselves build on the scientific method that has been employed for centuries by researchers, public health practitioners, and engineers.

The practical sources for this guide are drawn from our field experience working with conservation and development projects. Our approach has been developed and field tested in conjunction with our colleagues from many different BSP supported projects in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Their experience and input have helped make this guide more practical and realistic. We have also greatly benefited from the experience, insights, and knowledge of our colleagues in BSP and the broader conservation and development communities. Their feedback has greatly helped to refine the guide. Finally, we have been able to draw upon our personal experiences in designing, managing, and monitoring projects.

Although some of the materials and techniques presented in this guide are not new, we hope it contributes a simple, clear, logical, and yet comprehensive approach to effectively integrating and applying these concepts to conservation and development projects. And we hope that as you use and improve on the approach presented in this guide you will let us know about your experiences. You can reach us at the following address:

Measures of Success c/o Island Press, Box 7, Covelo, CA 95428, USA.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the many individuals and organizations who have contributed to our work on this book.

Our approach to developing conceptual models and project management and monitoring plans was developed in conjunction with our BSP colleagues in preparation for a series of monitoring workshops. These colleagues include Hank Cauley, Bernd Cordes, Frank Hicks, Stacy Roberts, Diane Russell, Kathy Saterson, and Meg Symington of BSP and Doug Mason of USAID. This approach was greatly refined and enhanced by input and feedback from participants in workshops held for staff of projects supported by BSP’s Biodiversity Convention Network (BCN) and Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) Program.

Subsequent versions of the approach have been field tested by project staff and community members at a number of projects in Asia, the Pacific, and Latin America. This book would not have been possible without their input. In particular, we thank Robert Bino, John Ericho, Arlyne Johnson, and the other staff of Research and Conservation Foundation of Papua New Guinea (RCF-PNG); Cosmas Makamet, Kurt Merg, John Sengo, and the other staff of the Foundation for the Peoples of the South Pacific, Papua New Guinea (FSP-PNG); Jane Larme and David Samson of PHF; and Andreas Lehnhoff, Oscar Nuñez, Estuardo Secaira, Marie Claire Paiz, and Eliseo Gálvez of Defensores de la Naturaleza, Guatemala.

For reviewing and commenting on various drafts of this guide, we thank the following: Joanne Abbot of the International Institute for Environmental Development (IIED), Janis Alcorn of BSP, Jane Bertrand of Tulane University, William Bertrand of Tulane University, Katrina Brandon, Michael Brown, Bernd Cordes of BSP, Jan Crocker of The Nature Conservancy (TNC), Gretchen Daily of Stanford University, Barbara Dugelby of TNC, Eric Fajer of USAID, Ann Fitzgerald, Mark Freudenberger of World Wildlife Fund-United States (WWF-US), Lynne Gaffikin, Gary Hartshorn of the Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS), Rodney Jackson of The Mountain Institute (TMI), Nandita Jain of TMI, Diane Jukof-sky of Rainforest Alliance, Agi Kiss of The World Bank, Claire Kremen of Stanford University, Virginia Ktsanes of,Tulane University, Evelyn Landry of AVSC International, Tom Lovejoy of the Smithsonian Institution, Leo Minaisian of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, Bruce Moffat of TNC, Ruth Norris, Emilio Ochoa of University of Rhode Island Coastal Resources Center (URI/CRC), Pat O’Connor of USAID, Danyelle O’Hara of WWF-US, Walter Parham, John Parks of EcoTrack, Chuck Peters of the Institute of Economic Botany, Mark Renzi of the LIFE Programme, Alison Richard of Yale University, Don Robadue of URI/CRC, Johanna Rosier of Massey University, Diane Russell of BSP, Vance Russell of BSP, Kathy Saterson of BSP, John Sengo of FSP-PNG, Susan Shen of The World Bank, Meg Symington of BSP, Rod Taylor of BSP, Jim Tobey of URI/CRC, Bill Ulfelder of TNC, Linda Usdin, Anthony Willett of BSP, Barbara Wycoff-Baird, and Agnes Zeller, NGM.

Special thanks go to Janet Rice of Tulane University for commenting and advising us on Chapter 7. This chapter was one of the most challenging ones to write and her assistance and suggestions improved it immensely.

We would like to thank William Bertrand for his tireless insistence on developing conceptual models as the first step in project design. We thank Kathy Saterson and Hank Cauley for encouraging us to write and publish this book. We also thank Hillary Barbour, Connie Carrol, Jill Cheek, Norah Heckman, and Jennifer Jordan for their help in managing logistics. We thank Peter Cassat and Michael Goldberg for their good counsel. We thank John Parks for his help in reviewing the literature and compiling comments on earlier drafts. We thank Gretchen Daily for being a strong advocate for the publication of this book. We would also like to thank Barbara Dean and the staff at Island Press for their help in bringing this book to print. Finally, we wish to acknowledge Anna Balla for the long hours she put into creating the wonderful artwork found throughout this book.

The structure, layout, and tone of this book have been influenced by other guidebooks including: Where There is No Doctor by David Werner, Anybody’s Bike Book by Tom Cuthbertson, Mining Group Gold by Thomas Kayser, The Joy of Home Brewing by Charlie Papazan, and Sustainable Harvest of Non-timber Plant Resources in Tropical Moist Forest: An Ecological Primer by Charles Peters.

Chapter 1

Introduction

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Four Project Scenarios

Measures of Success is structured around four scenarios that show the many challenges of managing conservation and development projects around the world. These projects are implemented by various types of groups, including nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), government agencies, local communities, and advocacy groups. We will draw on these scenarios throughout the guide to illustrate our approach to project design, management, and monitoring. The complete scenarios are also presented in Appendix A. Although the scenarios are hypothetical, they are based on real sites and projects. We hope that you will find elements of your project among them so that they may give you some ideas for your site. The projects presented in these scenarios are being carried out by our project team.

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Tropical Forest Scenario

Suppose you are the manager of an NGO that is responsible for managing the Indah Biosphere Reserve. The core area of the reserve contains approximately 100,000 hectares of tropical moist forest which includes a mixture of primary and secondary forests. The 80,000 hectare buffer zone around the core area contains 30 small villages whose residents include native and migrant peoples. Residents of the villages are primarily subsistence farmers who grow grains, other food crops, and a few cash crops in small shifting agricultural plots in the forest. Residents also collect timber and nontimber forest products (NTFPs) which they use in their homes and sell in local markets. From what you can tell, it appears that the major threats to the forest include expansion of farms into forest areas, local overharvesting of forest products, commercial logging, expansion of cattle ranches, and the development of a large dam for hydro-electric power generation. At this point, the NGO that you are working for is planning a project that will involve working with community members to develop a few of the forest products for national and international sale and other interventions.

Savannah Scenario

Suppose you are a wildlife biologist working for the local office of the Government Park Service to coordinate a project to design and implement a conservation plan for Karimara National Park. The park is 750,000 hectares of savannah and grasslands in a semi-arid, subtropical setting with an additional 500,000 hectares of land in wildlife management areas (WMAs) around the park. Outside of the WMAs are a number of settlements inhabited by semi-nomadic livestock herders who graze their cattle in the WMAs and occasionally in the park. Residents of the settlements depend on their livestock and limited hunting and gathering of wild animals and plants for subsistence. Major threats to the park include overgrazing, overhunting, and poaching of large mammal species, and the effects of a rapidly increasing and unregulated foreign tourism industry. The Government Park Service is considering taking a number of steps to protect the park against these threats.

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Coastal Scenario

Suppose you are the formally educated son or daughter of the traditional leader of a coastal village who has been chosen by your people to help them find the best way to maintain their resources for future generations. Your village is located at the mouth of a river flowing from upland forests through mangrove forests into Bocoro Bay. The residents of your village get most of their food from fishing and gathering shellfish in the river and coral reefs surrounding the bay. Residents cook their food and build their houses using wood from the mangrove forests growing along the coast. Over the past few years, you and your neighbors have noticed that residents of neighboring villages are increasingly coming into your village’s traditional fishing grounds. In addition, large fishing boats from other countries have begun operating in the same area. The elders of the community have noticed over time that local fishermen have to go farther away from the community to catch enough fish to eat and sell and that they are catching smaller fish. In addition, silt and pollution coming down the river have ruined many of the reefs. Furthermore, it is becoming harder to find shrimp in coastal areas near small rivers where the mangroves have been cut down. The elders are now proposing to enhance your people’s traditional resource management systems to conserve the plant and animal resources in the bay for future generations.

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Wetlands Scenario

Suppose you are the manager of a local chapter of a conservation advocacy group whose members live near the Everson Watershed. The wetlands in the watershed serve as important habitats for migratory birds and for a number of fish and game species. These species support extensive recreational uses of the area including birdwatching, canoeing, fishing, and hunting. The wetlands are also part of the water supply system for major urban areas in the watershed. The wetlands are threatened by growing development and urbanization including road construction and dredging. They are also affected by water pollution (especially from agricultural chemicals) and invasions of exotic plant and animal species. You are planning to work with local landowners and governments to purchase or obtain conservation easements on lands containing critical wetland and upstream habitat. In addition, your organization is hoping to work to educate the public about the importance of the upstream habitats in maintaining the wetlands. Finally, you are hoping to devise a management plan to help control some of the impacts of exotic species.

Purpose of This Guide

Conservation and development

projects have as their primary goal the conservation of natural ecosystems and species. They are based on the philosophy that, in order to maintain economic and community development, a healthy and viable natural resource base must be sustained. They operate by involving and addressing the needs of human stakeholders—the people who have an interest in the natural resources of the project site.

A common challenge found in our scenarios and all other conservation and development projects is to be able to measure the success of project interventions. In order to ensure that desired conservation impacts occur, you need to know which actions work and which don’t—and you need to know why. You also need to make sure that your project activities have a positive impact on the stakeholders the project is designed to benefit. Finally, if you are supported by outside organizations or are working with or for local communities, you need to be able to demonstrate to them that you are accomplishing the goals and objectives that were set out at the start of the project.

In this guide, the term project is not limited to referring to part of a formal, externally funded program. Instead, it is used to refer to any set of actions undertaken by any group of managers, researchers, or local stakeholders interested in achieving certain defined goals and objectives. For example, a project could include steps that community members take to revive traditional resource-harvesting customs.

In response to the challenge of measuring project impact, an increasing number of practitioners are attempting to fully integrate monitoring into the design and management of their projects. These practitioners are faced, however, with a number of constraints in accomplishing this integration. For example, project staff are often so involved with day-to-day operations that they may feel that they don’t have the time or money to invest in monitoring. Likewise, field staff may believe that monitoring can only be done by experts or scientists and that they are not qualified to do the job. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, people may simply feel that they don’t know how to design comprehensive and useful management and monitoring plans.

Practitioners are managers, researchers, and local stakeholders who are responsible for designing, managing, and monitoring conservation and development projects.

In this guide, we use monitoring to refer to the periodic collection and evaluation of data relative to stated project goals, objectives, and activities. Many people often also refer to this process as monitoring and evaluation (M&E).

Our motivation in writing this guide is a strong belief that, although these constraints are real, they can and must be overcome if conservation and development projects are ultimately to succeed. Although sound project design, management, and monitoring require an investment of time and money, we think that this investment will save resources in the long run by ensuring that the project is effective. Without adequate planning and monitoring, you have no sure way of knowing whether the project is making a positive difference or, worse yet, causing unintended negative impacts. In addition, we believe that the people who are most qualified to design, manage, and monitor projects are the field-based practitioners and local stakeholders who are most familiar with local conditions—not outside experts or professionals. Finally, although every site has unique conditions making it impossible to develop a project design, management, and monitoring cookbook, we feel that it is possible to come up with general guidelines that can help people determine what they need to do and how best to do it.

Biodiversity is the variety and variability of life on earth. It is an abbreviation for biological diversity.

The purpose of Measures of Success is to demonstrate a simple, clear, and systematic approach to designing, managing, and monitoring projects that seek to conserve biodiversity. Whether you are a project manager, village leader, or researcher, it is our hope that this guide will assist you in developing and implementing more successful conservation and development projects.

Adaptive management is a process originally developed to manage natural resources in large-scale ecosystems by deliberate experimentation and systematic monitoring of the results. (See the references at the end of chapter 8 for more information about adaptive management.)

Principles Behind This Guide

A fundamental principle behind Measures of Success involves applying the concepts of adaptive management to conservation and development projects. In this context, adaptive management involves integrating project design, management, and monitoring to provide a framework for testing assumptions, adaptation, and learning.

In this guide, we are using project assumption to refer to a causal chain of project activities and factors that affect a target condition. In scientific terms, it is equal to a hypothesis. We are using underlying assumptions to refer to the effects that other conditions and factors could potentially have on this causal chain. Although it is helpful to divide assumptions into these two categories, there is definitely a gray area between them—many underlying assumptions could actually be part of a project assumption.

Testing assumptions is about systematically trying different interventions to achieve a desired outcome. It is not, however, a random trial-and-error process. Instead, it involves first thinking about the situation at your project site, developing a specific project assumption about how a given intervention will achieve the outcome, and determining what underlying assumptions are behind this project assumption. You then implement the intervention and monitor the actual results to see how they compare to the ones predicted by your assumptions. The key here is to develop an understanding of not only which interventions work and which do not, but also why.

Adaptation is about systematically using the results of this monitoring to improve your project. If your project intervention did not achieve the expected results, it is because either your assumptions were wrong, your interventions were poorly executed, the conditions at the project site have changed, your monitoring was faulty, or some combination of these problems. Adaptation involves changing your assumptions and your interventions to respond to the new information obtained through your monitoring efforts.

Process Hint: See chapter 2 for a more detailed discussion of assumptions in the context of the projects cycle and chapter 6 for examples of common project assumptions.

Finally, learning is about systematically documenting the process that your team has gone through and the results you have achieved. This documentation will help your team avoid making the same mistakes in the future. Furthermore, it will enable other people in the broader conservation and development community to benefit from your experiences. Other practitioners are eager to learn from your successes and failures so that they can design and manage better projects and avoid some of the hazards and perils you may have encountered. Through sharing what you have learned from your project, you will help conservation efforts around the world.

The Threat Reduction Assessment approach to project design, management, and monitoring is described in greater detail in chapter 3.

A second key principle behind Measures of Success involves taking a strategic Threat Reduction Assessment (TRA) approach to project design, management, and monitoring. Conservation and development projects typically involve complex mixtures of biological, social, economic, and institutional factors. The TRA process presented in this guide attempts to simplify project design and monitoring by directly identifying, addressing, and tracking the threats to biodiversity at a given site. In effect, threat reduction provides both a framework for developing the objective of the project and a framework for measuring conservation success. This strategy involves obtaining a mixture of social and biological data to measure project outcome—a fundamental shift from the traditional approach which involves only assessing the biological effects of project activities.

Style of This Guide

Measures of Success is written primarily with conservation and development practitioners in mind. For simplicity, we use the word you to refer both to the reader and the group that he or she is working with—this does not mean that we assume the reader is necessarily the leader of the group.

To meet the needs of this audience, this guide has been written to be as simple and as easy to use as possible. The first time that key words are used they are highlighted in semibold italics and defined in a sidebar or highlighted in italics and defined in the text. We also collect the terms and definitions in a glossary in Appendix B.

We have also scattered Process Hints in sidebars throughout the book that point out ideas that you may find helpful while using the approach presented in this guide. We also use many examples and drawings to illustrate the information being presented. These examples are drawn from the four scenarios that have been developed specifically to represent real-world conservation and development situations and projects.

Finally, you will notice that we spend a good deal of time defining words. In addition, our approach involves spending substantial time considering ways of phrasing goals, objectives, and other items in your Project Plan. We focus on definitions and language because we believe the success of this approach critically depends on everyone having a common and clear understanding of what the project is trying to accomplish. We hope that clear and specific definitions of terms will also facilitate cross-project learning by providing a common language for discussion.

Structure of This Guide

Project cycle refers to the steps involved in developing and implementing a project and monitoring plan, and analyzing the results.

An overview of the general process described in Measures of Success is presented in the accompanying project cycle diagram. In addition to the starting and ending boxes, the diagram contains five diamonds, each of which represents a different stage in the overall cycle. These diamonds generally need to occur in the order represented by the letters A–E. The diamonds themselves, however, are part of an iterative process that involves going through the cycle numerous times as outlined at the bottom of the sketch.

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Iterative means repeatedly going through a series of steps in a process.

Although Measures of Success is presented in a sequential and highly structured fashion, we realize that most people working on a project would not follow such a restricted step-by-step order. Instead, an experienced practitioner would work the problem from both ends—thinking first about the audiences for monitoring information and then about goals and maybe then about information needs and then maybe finally going back to the conceptual model. So, although for clarity we have presented the approach as a linear process in this guide, we would encourage you not to feel bound to it.

Start: Clarify Group’s Mission

A mission statement provides a vision for the future of your group—your long-term desired outcome and the strategy for getting there. Before setting out to design a new project, you must have a clear understanding of your group’s mission. If you plan to work with other groups on the new project, it is also important to understand their missions and how your mission relates to theirs.

Process Hint: Don’t worry if you have trouble understanding any of the words used in the description of the contents of each step in the project cycle. Most of these terms are described in each specific chapter

A: Design a Conceptual Model Based on Local Site Conditions

A Conceptual Model is the foundation of all project design, management, and monitoring activities. It is a diagram of a set of relationships between certain factors that are believed to impact or lead to your target condition. The model is first built to present a picture of the project area prior to the start of the project. It is next adapted to reflect local site conditions and then used to identify and rank the key threats to biodiversity that your project will address.

B: Develop a Management Plan: Goals, Objectives, and Activities

A Management Plan describes the explicit goals, objectives, and activities designed to address threats identified in the Conceptual Model. Goals are broad statements of the desired state toward which the project is directed. Objectives are more specific statements of the desired outcomes or accomplishments of the project. Activities are specific actions that project participants take to reach each of the project’s objectives which in turn should lead to realization of the project’s goal. All activities need to be linked to specific objectives that target critical threat factors identified in your Conceptual Model. These linked chains of activities and factors are your project assumptions.

C: Develop a Monitoring Plan

A Monitoring Plan describes how you will assess the success of your project interventions. The plan starts by outlining who your audiences are, what their informational needs are, what monitoring strategies you will employ to get the data needed to meet each of these needs, and the specific indicators you will measure. The remainder of the plan lists how, when, by whom, and where data for these indicators will be collected.

D: Implement Management and Monitoring Plans

The Project Conceptual Model, Management Plan, and Monitoring Plan taken together comprise a complete Project Plan. This stage involves implementing this Project Plan. From this point forward, however, it becomes more difficult for us to describe a specific process that you’ll need to follow. Instead, in chapters 6 and 7, we provide reference material to assist you in determining what tools and techniques are best suited for implementing your particular Project Plan. We first discuss implementing your Management Plan and some of the common project assumptions that lie behind conservation and development projects. We then discuss several parts of your Monitoring Plan in more detail, including designing your monitoring strategy, selecting the specific units to monitor, and selecting the appropriate monitoring methods. Finally, we discuss implementing this plan, including preparing for field work, collecting data, and storing and handling data.

E: Analyze Data and Communicate Results

Once data have been collected, you need to analyze them and communicate the results to your internal and external audiences. In chapter 7, we discuss selected tools and techniques for analyzing data and for communicating the resulting