Increasingly, what is working is monitoring that involves the communities themselves. In the past, monitoring was usually designed by outsiders and implemented by consultants who flew in for a quick orientation, expecting NGOs or community members to miraculously provide data and information. Furthermore, monitoring was typically not a part of the original conservation project design; it was considered only after the fact and often did not focus on the most appropriate data.

Successful monitoring involves simple, effective tools that communities can easily manage and want to use.

In contrast, community-based monitoring is the ongoing collection, analysis, and use of resource management information at the community level, where many of the threats to biodiversity originate and resource-use decisions are made. It usually begins with community members' perception that things aren't what they used to be, that there is a danger of forever losing what they have, and that they better do something about it. The community decides on what to monitor and is responsible, at least in part, for the collection, analysis, and use of the information. The results of monitoring must be integrated into a community decision-making process that allows people to weigh evidence and propose actions.

Finding the common ground to monitor natural resources reaches far beyond the community level. It is a collaborative process that necessarily includes community participants, but may also involve conservation practitioners, NGOs, governments, and a suite of partners with expertise in collecting and using information to facilitate informed decision-making.

Effective monitoring can help a community deal with threats to its future, come up with possible interventions to address the threats, analyze how well actions are working, and provide the insight to know how to modify behavior and management practices. Simple monitoring systems that can be easily managed by local people can raise community awareness and commitment to protecting local biodiversity.

Monitoring can also lead to unexpected insights. In one community in southern Mexico, where farmers were monitoring their efforts to increase yields in impoverished soils, they mulched to add nutrients. "To their surprise," says Meg Symington, former Director of BSP's Latin America and Caribbean Program, "they found that mulching worked -- but not in the way they had anticipated. It turned out that the moisture-retaining properties of mulching were the most important factor in raising yields, but not by directly adding nutrients. Water was the limiting factor. But by mulching the soil, the water retention improved and nutrient levels increased." Monitoring tells you whether your interventions are doing what you think they should, but monitoring will not tell you what to do in the first place.

Like many other practitioners, BSP-supported partners met serious obstacles when they first attempted monitoring. On the bright side, because we've been monitoring our own efforts, we now know how to deal with them better. Early monitoring programs, especially those measuring ecological impacts, were often poorly focused, too academic to be useful, and not perceived by the communities as their own.

Our experiences have shown that there's no getting around it -- monitoring is a key to conservation. Consequently, designing simple, effective tools that communities will want to use and developing training in those tools have become a primary focus of BSP's conservation work.

To address this need, BSP's Richard Margoluis, Director of the Analysis and Adaptive Management Program, and Nick Salafsky, Senior Program Officer for BCN, developed a practitioner's manual entitled Measures of Success: Designing, Managing and Monitoring Conservation and Development Projects. Simplified community-based monitoring methods taught by BSP staff are transforming monitoring and evaluation from a bureaucratic requirement into a functional tool. "Monitoring is being reincarnated-instead of a Frankenstein running around and getting people scared, it's now something really useful," says John Parks, a BCN "trainer of trainers" who teaches community monitoring based on the approach described in Measures of Success.

The following summaries and case story highlight what BSP has learned so far in our attempts to facilitate community-based conservation by NGOs, communities, and governments.

Common Obstacles

Talk to anyone about monitoring and they'll either swear by it, or run for cover -- depending on their past experiences. Time and again, people avoid monitoring for what, on the surface, seem like good reasons; but often these are exactly the reasons why they should monitor.

1. Work Overload

   Historically, many NGOs have done monitoring and evaluation only because it is required by donors as a prerequisite to funding. People working in local, national, and international NGOs and government organizations often view monitoring as an additional burden to their crushing workloads. Project staff may be so swamped with day-to-day operations that they may believe they do not have the time or money to invest in monitoring. BSP-supported practitioners, who are the first to admit they are as overwhelmed by work as anyone, would argue that you can't afford not to monitor. It is a waste of time and resources to continue down paths that aren't working.

2. Fear of Revealing Failure

   From a community's perspective, people fear that monitoring will reveal problems that the community then has to deal with. From an NGO's perspective, reluctance to monitor often stems from the perception that funding is tied to success, and monitoring can indicate failure. But it's the only way to keep on track, especially since environmental conditions may be constantly changing. Monitoring offers a corrective insight and tells you where your actions are taking you. It provides the necessary information to make optimal decisions about how your activities affect change in whatever condition you are trying to influence. Therefore, embracing the fact that conservation is about learning along the way and adapting to what you've learned are essential. And donor agencies must be educated to share this view.

3. What to Monitor, Where to Begin?

   A common perception is that monitoring has to be very precise, complicated, and therefore should be left up to scientists or experts. Because people often lack clear, concise guidelines for developing monitoring strategies, they either avoid monitoring altogether or halfheartedly fulfill poorly designed basic requirements, never benefiting from the results that monitoring could bring. From the outset, monitoring has to be integral to a project's overall design. Unless it begins early in the project, any insights it provides will be "too little too late."

4. Different Agendas

   Different agendas between communities and other stakeholders can lead to disagreement over monitoring indicators. Conservation practitioners have to facilitate monitoring that reflects what the community wants to do or is already doing. The indicators have to reflect the concerns of the community. For example, "scientists might be interested in saving coral reef biodiversity while the community is more interested in maintaining stocks of fish," observes Kath Shurcliff, Director of BSP's KEMALA (Community-based Conservation Program) in Indonesia. So there may be disagreement about the indicators even though the outcomes are linked. Sometimes scientific and community monitoring can go hand in hand and sometimes they can't.

5. Destabilizing Community Circumstances

   The nature of a community can be an obstacle or an advantage to monitoring. In countries like Rwanda, for example, people are moved around by war. In Nepal, illiteracy can be a stumbling block because it limits data collection. And people who are trying to scrape together the day's food may not be able to sustain monitoring activities. Within communities, different groups' conflicting needs come into play. "I believe that, nine times out of ten, the reason projects flounder is due to a lack of understanding and attention to political agendas," says John Parks. "Project managers focus on the obvious, resource use, rather than on how to mitigate conflicting agendas -- what different groups' needs are." If community stability and cohesion are seriously lacking, monitoring is less likely to succeed.

   Selection of what to monitor must reflect the concerns of the community.

6. Lack of Resource Tenure

   Monitoring is more likely to succeed when you work with a group that has land or resource tenure and traditional ecological knowledge of their natural resources. If communities have tenure, they have a stronger incentive to manage their resources. "If they don't have that long-term security, the tendency is to mine the resources before someone else does," says Judy Oglethorpe, Director of BSP's Africa and Madagascar Program. "You need a well-defined community that has limits and entitlement to benefits. You need a community-based management structure, good organization, and an adequate resource base." These elements are so fundamental that BSP's biodiversity conservation projects often begin by helping communities not recognized as the stewards of their own resources try to establish tenure.

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