Portfolio Criteria
These criteria are used to weigh the different projects against one another in respect to key factors related to the specific hypotheses that you wish to pursue. For each criterion, you must decide whether it is desirable to have projects in the portfolio clustered in a few categories or to have projects more evenly distributed across the range of categories. In scientific parlance, your ideal goal should be to hold background categories constant while maintaining adequate variance across the key experimental factors. For example, we may choose to have all of our projects focus on one thematic approach to be able to test that approach. Within this approach, however, we would want to have a wide variance across key factors. Examples of criteria that you might want to use include:
Some of BCN's Portfolio Criteria:
In looking at enterprise-based approaches to conservation, we wanted to ensure all kinds of eco-enter-prises were represented so we could more adequately test the hypothesis. Categories that we included in our portfolio included non-timber forest product harvesting, timber harvesting, ecosystem service, nature tourism, and research tourism enterprises.
Select Your Portfolio
Once you have received your proposals and determined the criteria that you will use to evaluate them, you are now in a position to select your portfolio. This selection process has to be conducted by some group of people empowered to make decisions. It may be staff members. It may be an advisory board. In either case, it would be theoretically ideal if each person on the review panel were to read all proposals. Unfortunately, most people involved with review panels generally do not have the time to do so. You thus need to develop a system for making sure that all proposals get read and presented in a fair way to the entire group.
One such system involves assigning at least two reviewers to each proposal - a primary reviewer and a secondary reviewer. Both reviewers are responsible for reading the proposal and then presenting it to the group as a whole. Having at least two reviewers read each proposal helps ensure that your process is less vulnerable to bias on the part of any one reviewer. It obviously has the cost, however, of doubling the workload for your review panel. An example of a review sheet that your reviewers can fill out for each proposal is presented in the sidebar on the next page.
There are several issues that you may have to address in setting up your review process:
•Points - You can either rank projects based on your criteria on an informal basis or you can develop a formal point system. A formal point system can have the advantage of forcing you to be more systematic in your assessments. It is, however, only going to be as good as the criteria you use - and there is a danger of false precision.
•Weights - Whether or not you use a formal point system, you also need to decide whether you will weight all criteria equally or whether certain criteria are more important than others in deciding between projects. Often weights are a function of the portfolio requirements.
•Site bias - Program officers who visit a project and meet people may develop site bias. Although it is helpful to have the program officer serve as an “advocate” for a project, there also need to be some checks and balances to ensure a measure of impartiality.
•Wait lists - If you have a fixed budget for your program and are considering proposals over several review periods, you may have to establish a wait list.. You can use this list to "store" those proposals that do not stand out far above the others, but that you do not want to reject immediately. The wait list can help you avoid funding too many mediocre proposals early on in the process at the expense of better ones submitted later in the process.
BCN's Proposal Review Sheet:
BCN proposal reviewers were asked to summarize the following points in their reviews.
1. Bottom Line - What is your final recommendation?
2. Setting - Describe the project's physical and institutional setting and the problem or issue that it is trying to address.
3. Proposed Activities - Briefly describe the proposed activities.
4. Team Qualifications - Describe the project team's qualifications for doing this work.
5. Budget, Timeframe, Results, Monitoring, and Feasibility - Describe what funds will be used for, what results are supposed to come out of the project, how the project will monitor and report on these results, and whether the overall proposal seems feasible.
6. Portfolio Considerations - Describe how the proposed project fits into the overall portfolio of projects being considered.
7. Other Comments - Outline any other information that might be useful.
STEP C: DEVELOP AN ANALYTICAL
FRAMEWORK
The third step in developing a learning program is to figure out how you and your partners will collect the data necessary to test your hypothesis. Your analytical framework is best developed as early as possible in the overall program. It should be developed by the project team members who will be directly responsible for collecting and analyzing the data. This means that outside consultants and experts should only play an advisory role if they have any role at all. It also means that you cannot merely include the directors of each project, but must include the project field staff. As a result, most if not all of the tasks in this step are probably best conducted in the form of one or more workshops that involve the various project teams in your portfolio (see Step D). Alternatively, they could be conducted by exchanging information through e-mails, web sites, or letters, although this can be more difficult and time-consuming.
Determine Your Key Audiences
Your first task is to broadly determine who it is that you want to reach with the information about your hypothesis and what it is that they would like to know. There are two main types of audiences:
•Internal - The members of your project teams and overall program.
•External - People outside of your program, including other implementing groups, donors, policy-makers, and the general public.
Each of these audiences will have its own specific information needs in relation to your hypotheses.
BCN's Clients:
We identified nine different audiences:
1. Community members
2. Field practitioners
3. NGO managers
4. Donors
5. Policy-makers
6. Academics
7. Media
8. Private businesses
9. General public
Develop Conceptual Models of Projects
Your next three priorities are to ensure that each of the project teams has a solid conceptual understanding of its project, that all of the teams develop a common language that they can use to discuss the issues they are facing, and that all of the teams are focused on similar target conditions. All three of these priorities can be addressed by having each project team develop and then present a Conceptual Model of the system its project is dealing with and a Management Plan outlining how the project will affect this system (see Margoluis and Salafsky 1998 for a description of how to develop these items). Each team should present its model to the group and the models should be discussed and critiqued.
Better Late Than Never:
BCN only developed the concept of doing workshops in which groups develop conceptual models and formal management plans for their projects several years into the program. So, although we did not do this as early as we should have, late was better than never.
In a perfect world, however, project teams will have completed these tasks in the process of developing their proposals. Indeed, if you have substantial resources, you may even wish to consider holding these workshops in Step B, during which all potential grant applicants complete these tasks. These workshops will also have the benefit of giving your selection committee better knowledge of the project and project teams. However, they can also create inflated expectations.
Combine Models to Identify Key Questions
Once each team has developed its model, the next task involves having all of the teams combine their models to identify commonalities and differences and thus begin to develop a program-wide model. As a general rule, no two models will look exactly alike. However, if the portfolio has been carefully selected, there should be a fair amount of overlap among the models. In many cases, what might appear to be substantive differences between models may instead turn out only to be the result of different terminology or of splitting and lumping the same factors in different ways. It is thus worth spending some time discussing these issues to see where the true similarities and differences exist.
In any event, the goal here is not necessarily to create one unified model. Instead, you want to identify key sections or "chains" across the project models that seem to have either strong similarities or interesting differences. Developing a sense of what is truly "interesting" is a large part of the "art" of doing this type of work.
Identifying Chains:
All the project team members involved in the portfolio should be involved in developing these "chains." However, it may be more efficient for a small group of people to compare the different project models and identify common factors which can then be presented back to the group as a whole.
Based on these chains, the group should be able to determine a series of research questions (sub-hypotheses) about the models. In cases where there is substantial agreement among the models, you may only formulate one basic sub-hypothesis. In cases where there is disagreement, you may need to formulate a series of sub-hypotheses that are perhaps linked to different conditions. This series of sub-hypotheses should show the different potential mechanisms by which two or more factors are related.
Three Alternative Sub-Hypotheses
In this example, suppose we are interested in the relationship between migration and resource use. The model shows three potential mechanisms or sub-hypotheses (SH1-SH3) that could explain the relationship. By collecting data about each of the boxes across a portfolio of projects, we could determine the conditions under which each of the relationships holds.
Looking Outside the Lamplight:
There is an old parable about a woman walking down the street one night who sees a man searching for something under a street lamp. She asks the man what he is looking for and the man replies that he has dropped his keys. So she helps the man look. After about five minutes, she remarks how it is strange that they have not yet found the keys. She then asks the man if he knows where he dropped the keys. The man tells her that he dropped them about half a block earlier. She then asks with amazement, "Then why are you looking here?!" He replies, "Because this is where the light is."
In many cases, the initial monitoring plans that BCN received from projects were looking under the lamplight. Academic researchers involved with the projects proposed highly specialized studies that generally seemed to fit with their academic research interests. Over time, however, we and the project teams realized that less-exact work that is focused on the key variables can be far more valuable.
Each project must collect data on the same indicators using similar or, at least, comparable methods. For example, in doing our analysis we had a difficult time expressing benefits per capita in a consistent and meaningful way. This problem occurred because each project recorded household family size in different ways. Some groups reported population in terms of number of individuals, some in terms of numbers of children and adults (with the cut-off between the two at different ages ranging from 12 to 18), and some in terms of households. To solve this problem, BCN developed its Analytical Framework as a way of standardizing data collection.
Determine Data Collection Needs and Methods
The next task involves having the group decide what data are needed to test these sub-hypotheses and how these data will be collected. If you were starting with this task from scratch, it could be an extremely difficult proposition. However, if the group has completed the previous steps (and each project team has completed its own draft project-specific monitoring plan), this task should be relatively straightforward.
For each of the sub-hypotheses that you have identified earlier in the process, you should determine what data you would ideally need to test it. You should then consider what data you can realistically get. You then need to decide as a group what data you will actually try to collect. In making this decision, keep in mind that, as illustrated by the parable in the sidebar, it is generally better to have "approximate answers to exact questions" rather than "exact answers to approximate questions."
In determining what data you collectively need, it is helpful to think about the following items (see Margoluis and Salafsky 1998 for a detailed discussion of each item):
•Monitoring strategy - What comparison will each project be making over time? A case compared to itself over time? Or a case compared to control cases?
•Indicators - What specific unit of information will each project collect? Is this unit measurable, precise, consistent, and sensitive?
•Methods - What methods will each project use to collect these data? Are these methods accurate and reliable, cost-effective, feasible, and appropriate? Do the project teams have the capacity to use these methods in a reliable fashion?
In general, keep the monitoring plan as simple as possible. It is far better to have a few key pieces of data collected in a consistent manner across the entire portfolio rather than extensive but patchy data sets. It is also better to have all teams using similar methods and indicators to ensure consistency in the data.
Develop Data-Sharing Plans and a "Social Contract"
Traditionally, project data are seen as proprietary assets of the project that is collecting them. They are valuable for use in publications and can also contain sensitive or private information that can be misused. As a result, people tend to feel that data must be "guarded" to ensure that outside parties do not use them in unauthorized ways. Accordingly, it is vital that all the project members in the portfolio agree in advance how data that they collect will be stored, accessed, and used. This agreement needs to be explicit so there are no future misunderstandings.
As discussed in the introduction to this step, it is also important to develop the monitoring plan in conjunction with the project teams in your portfolio. A learning program will only work if all members of the portfolio "buy into the process." However, in light of field realities and human nature, you cannot rely exclusively on this "buy in" to get the monitoring work done - it is a necessary but not sufficient condition. When people are implementing a project in the field, day-to-day crises and problems mean that monitoring work will inevitably be postponed in favor of more urgent matters. To this end, it is necessary for the group to agree on some form of "social contract" with regard to enforcing the implementation of the mutually agreed-upon analytical framework. This may be a role that the donor will have to take on, perhaps even tying disbursement of funds to the timely submission of data to the group.
Enforcing Mutually Agreed-Upon Contracts:
In BCN's case, although we had good relations with most of our grantees, it was still a struggle to get consistent and timely data. We did not tie the disbursement of funds to our receiving data, but, in a next iteration of the program, we would certainly do so - especially with regard to baseline data at the beginning of project implementation.
STEP
D: IMPLEMENT PROJECTS & ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK
Implementing the projects and monitoring plans is obviously the most important step in this whole process. There is, however, very little specific advice about this step that we can outline here. Nonetheless, it is worth discussing the key roles that need to be filled to make a learning program work, and which of these roles donor staff might be able to play.
Ensure That All Roles Are Covered
Some of the most important roles that need to be filled in a learning program are:
• Program Designer - Develops the blueprint for the overall program.
• Program Manager - Implements and manages the overall program.
•Program Officer - Acts as a liaison between specific projects and the overall program.
• Program Administrator - Manages the logistical and financial details of the overall program.
• Program Coordinator - Manages the flow of information through the network.
• Research Coordinator - Coordinates the overall analytical work being undertaken by the program.
•Review Panel Member - Reviews potential grant applications and makes decisions about which will receive funding.
•Technical Resource Person - Provides technical support on specific issues such as project design or use of a particular monitoring method.
•Mentor - Works on a day-to-day basis with a project team to help them develop their capacity and skills. Can be employed by the project team or the overall program.
• Information Pollinator - Carries information from one project to another and promotes linkages.
• Data Collector - Develops databases and manages data entry and storage.
•Research Analyst - Analyzes the data based on the framework.
•Workshop Facilitator - Develops and facilitates workshops and meetings.
• Outreach Coordinator - Designs, edits, and coordinates production of outreach products including papers, books, videos, and other media.
•Webmaster - Designs, maintains, and works the web site or any other means of electronic communication.
Many of these roles are similar to existing roles in most programs. All of them, however, have elements that are different in the context of a learning program. And a few of them, such as the mentor or information pollinator, are uniquely demanded by a learning program.
Depending on the size and resources of your program, these roles can be assigned to separate people or combined in appropriate ways. Furthermore, they can be assigned to members of your staff, to members of the various project teams, or to outside parties. As a rule, however, it is better to have these roles played by people involved with the entire process rather than to have outsiders drifting in and out over time. Continuity is extremely valuable.
BCN Staff Roles:
BCN occupied an interesting position between being a donor and an implementing organization. We received funds from USAID which we used to design and implement a competitive grants program, and to conduct research to evaluate our core-hypothesis. As a result of this intermediary role, BCN staff ended up filling most if not all of the roles outlined in this section.
The fact that BCN staff had to simultaneously function as both donors and researchers was intially quite difficult. In particular, given the common perception that it is important to impress a donor, it was hard for our grantee partners to "trust us" and to feel that they could be candid about their project's challenges and problems.
Over time, however, by assigning staff to work with specific projects, we were able to develop working relationships with the project teams. More than anything else, these relationships enabled learning to take place.
Because BCN staff had to play so many roles, we had to hire people who were comfortable in an interdisciplinary environment. Hank Cauley, the former BCN Director, speaks about having a "T-shaped" mix of skills - depth in one area and then a broad range in complementary fields.
Invest in Face-to-Face Meetings
No matter how the different roles are allocated, it is vital to have the people involved in the program meet in regular face-to-face sessions. Regular e-mail, fax, and telephone contact is important and should be used as much as possible. It is also possible to work collaboratively by sharing documents back and forth — indeed, capturing all your thinking on paper or computer and then using it to promote discussion is an essential part of this overall process. Nonetheless, there is no substitute for people meeting and working directly with one another. Key face-to-face meetings that need to be held include:
•Preliminary site visits - Prior to selecting a project for inclusion in the portfolio, it is extremely helpful if the program officers or review panel members can meet the project team and, if possible, visit the project site. One glimpse of a site often gives far more information than a whole written project proposal.
• Administrative visits - Many projects often get overwhelmed by logistical and financial issues. Sending your program administrators to meet with project administrative teams early in the process can help identify and develop solutions to small issues that could later derail the entire project. This meeting will also enable the program administrators to develop a sense of the conditions under which field offices function. And, ideally, it will enable them to establish solid personal relationships, which will help resolve problems later on and will minimize intimidation and misunderstandings. The value of this interaction should not be underestimated.
•Training workshops - It is important to train people early on so that all projects use methods in a comparable fashion.
•Ongoing site visits - Have program staff regularly visit with project teams to get updates about the situation at the project site and to be able to play the information pollinator role.
•Cross-site visits - Encourage meetings between members of different project teams. These meetings sometimes require an external catalyst, but are almost always incredibly beneficial.
•Program team meetings - Have your entire core program team meet at least once a year, preferably twice, to discuss the progress of the program and key analytical issues.
•Network meetings - These meetings should involve either critical subsets of the network or the entire network. These meetings should be used to develop and update the monitoring and analysis plan.
Meetings are very expensive in terms of both people’s time and money. As a result, they should be planned with care and only held when absolutely necessary. It is vital to get the right people there - there is no point in having a meeting with the wrong people. There is generally a tradeoff between the number of groups involved in a meeting and the number of people who can come from each group. As a rule, limiting the number of groups involved but increasing the participation from each group is desirable.
Meetings, Meetings, Meetings:
Over time, BCN ended up holding all of the different types of meetings described in this section.
With regard to program site visits, our program staff initially had the sense that we were supposed to get a grassroots understanding of the project sites. After sitting through innumerable long meetings with community members, we began to realize that it was not really appropriate for us to be meeting officially with the community. Instead, our role was to work with our peers on the project team. As a result, we actually ended up spending more time in city offices than in the field sites.
With regard to the administrative site visits, although we only caught onto this idea midway through the program, we found these to be of enormous value for the reasons outlined in this section.
STEP E: ANALYZE
DATA & COMMUNICATE RESULTS
The final step in developing a learning program is to analyze your data and communicate the results to your key audiences. Although this step is necessarily the last one in our process, you should actually be thinking about these issues throughout the entire process.
Compile Data in a Standardized Format
The first task in this step involves gathering data from the various projects and entering them into a common database. Different types of databases that you may wish to develop include:
•Quantitative information - This is best stored in a database program or a spreadsheet program.
•Qualitative information - This is best stored in a text information program.
•Photographic information - This is best stored in a slide file or on a compact disc in digital format.
•Spatial information - This is best stored as part of a Geographic Information System.
•Video information - This is best stored as a film, video cassette, or digital library.
In each format, data need to be clearly labeled and standardized as much as possible. You should also design your database as early as possible in the overall process so that you can work out the bugs.
Testing Databases:
BCN staff designed an elaborate database system to store the information collected across the project. Unfortunately, the database was designed too late to get field staff to adopt it - and we ended up abandoning it in the interest of simplicity.
Analyze Data on an Ongoing Basis
If you have developed a good monitoring plan, analysis should be relatively straightforward. Nonetheless, it is essential not to wait until the end of the program to start your analysis. By doing analysis on an ongoing basis, you will be less likely to forget the context in which data were collected. You will also be able to make any necessary modifications to your monitoring plan to address gaps or problems. A second critical point in doing analysis is to have everyone in the program involved in the process. You should thus plan one or more workshops at which this joint analysis can take place.
Involving Project Teams in Analysis:
Some of the most rewarding analytical work that we did was at workshops with the project teams. At these meetings, team members provided analytical insights and perspectives that will undoubtedly be of great value to other conservation practitioners.
It is important to always keep your audiences in mind and to try to develop analyses that meet their needs. For example, if you are interested in helping practitioners, it might be helpful to try to develop general and yet non-trivial guiding principles as outlined in the box on the following page.
|
What Are General and Yet Non-Trivial Guiding Principles? In navigating the conservation and development landscape, there is no single path - no magic formula - that will lead a group to success. There are no guarantees that an intervention that works at one site in Indonesia will work equally well at another site in Brazil - or even at the same site in Indonesia the next year. On the other hand, it seems likely that there also is not an infinite number of paths leading to success. To be sure, the exact path that any group needs to follow depends on its starting point, its goals, the changing conditions at the site, and the conditions in the broader social, political, and economic context in which it is operating. But to say that there are no common aspects - that everything is site-specific - implies that there is no need for any kind of systematic science. Between the endpoints of this spectrum of possible paths is a vast middle ground in which there is some finite number of paths through the landscape. It is impossible to advise a project team exactly when and where it will encounter a given obstacle or catalyst, or what it should do upon encountering them. But is it possible to provide advice about commonly occurring catalysts and obstacles? Can we develop general knowledge about the obstacles groups are likely to run into - how to avoid them if possible and how to deal with them if they must? And can we discover catalysts that help groups to move towards their goal in a more efficient manner? If this middle ground exists, it is most likely to take the form of general and yet non-trivial guiding principles.
As shown in the right side of the diagram, at any given site there are specific principles that are of great use to people working at that site. For example, project team members working at a site in Papua New Guinea might develop a principle such as: Use Chief John to help settle any conflicts that arise between different clans. Unfortunately, site-specific principles do not really help a person working at the next site over, let alone at a site halfway around the world. On the far left side of the diagram are general principles that apply to most or all sites as illustrated by the example: Avoid conflict between clans. Unfortunately, most of these principles tend to be trivial - they are true but not very helpful to practitioners. The question thus becomes, "Are there general and yet non-trivial guiding principles?" as shown in the center of the diagram. It is most likely that, if these general and yet non-trivial principles exist, they will take the form of conditional probability statements. For example, we might develop the principle: In Melanesian type social systems, it is generally better to work with the big man to solve conflicts, unless he is corrupt. This principle applies in more than one place (throughout Melanesia) but not everywhere. Furthermore, it is not guaranteed to work in all instances. The user has to be smart enough to apply it to his or her own situation - for example, to determine if the big man is corrupt or not. Our job thus becomes determining not just what the principles are, but also under what conditions and with what probability of success each principle is likely to work. |
Develop Creative Communications Products
Your analysis is not complete until you have distributed a finished product to your audiences. There are a number of ways in which information can be presented, including oral presentations, discussion sessions, informal contacts, reports, press and media releases, brochures and pamphlets, formal papers and books, visual presentations, and internet presentations (see Margoluis and Salafsky 1998 for more detail about each of these techniques). You need to find the appropriate method or methods to meet the needs of your audience while keeping within your time and financial budgets. Two general rules are:
• Find creative ways to communicate your findings - don't just rely on writing thick reports.
• Package each finding in multiple ways to reach multiple audiences.
Creatively Communicating Info:
BCN has been trying to find creative ways to present information.
Examples include:
•Borrowing an idea from our Solomon Island partners, BCN staff gave a presentation to our colleagues in Washington using a theater action group technique to get our message across.
•A previous BCN publication, If Only I Knew Then What I Know Now (Salafsky 1999), looks at the experience of a project and lets the team members tell their story in their own words.
Survey Audiences
Once you have distributed your communications products, you should then survey your audiences to make sure that the products are meeting their needs. You want to learn how to make these products better.
Iterate
Now that you have completed the whole process, it is time to apply what you have learned. Take what you have learned and use it as a guide to move forward. The point of doing this testing is to be able to use the results to get better at what you are doing - and to avoid making similar mistakes in the future. You should also make sure you evaluate your program against your initial goals and objectives to make sure you are on course.
Costs of Learning Programs
Now that you have gone through the process for setting up a learning program, we're sure you realize that this approach has some definite costs. In particular, compared to a typical program, this type of program requires:
•More staff - You need a much greater investment in skilled interdisciplinary program staff than with a typical program. This staff must be housed within the donor organization, within the project teams, or (as was the case with BCN) in an intermediary organization.
•More money - As a corollary to the above point, you need more money to pay for the staff as well as the meetings required.
•A willingness to value failure - The process that we've described depends on openness and honesty. It requires people who are willing to openly talk to donor staff or their bosses about failure. And it requires that the donor or program managers take a "safe-fail" approach in which an honest appraisal of problems is valued above bottom-line results.
•A willingness to experiment - Undertaking a learning program means that you are not sure about the best course of action to take - if you were certain, there would be no point in testing alternatives. In many cases, however, government officials and other decision-makers may be reluctant to undertake "experimental" actions. A learning program thus requires groups that are willing to deal with uncertainty.
•A necessarily narrow focus - One of the interesting aspects of a learning program is that it requires you to restrict your focus so that you can test you hypothesis. This restriction can at times be frustrating. For example, with regard to BCN's first goal of making conservation happen, we learned that a given project should employ a wide range of strategies that are appropriate to the specific conditions at the project site. This selection of strategies may or may not include enterprise-based approaches. With regard to our second goal of testing our hypothesis, however, we had to restrict our focus to only enterprise-based strategies. This led to some serious contradictions and tough choices.
Benefits of Learning Programs
By this point, you will, we hope, also appreciate that a learning program has some major benefits - that an effective program is truly greater than the sum of its parts.
•Improved knowledge - The major benefit of a learning program is, of course, the knowledge and learning that comes from the collective research being done.
•Cross-project learning - Another major benefit is the learning that occurs from both successful and less-successful projects, and the cross-project networking and capacity building that happens through meetings and workshops.
•Improved partnerships - Another important, but less obvious, benefit is that a learning approach can break down the traditional hierarchy that separates donor or program management and project staff. Instead of an unequal donor-grantee relationship, there is now a transaction between equal partners involving funding in return for information. Instead of having managers primarily serve as paper-pushing bureaucrats, they become "scientists" involved in research. It has been our experience that this shift in perspective makes everyone's job much more enjoyable and interesting.
Balancing the Costs and Benefits
Unfortunately, there is no simple cost-benefit equation that can be used to compute whether you should undertake a learning program approach. We can't guarantee that spending an additional $100,000 on staff and travel will buy $150,000 worth of knowledge and job satisfaction. On a more instinctive level, however, we can say that having been through this process once, BCN staff and grantees agree that this process has been very rewarding. It seems that at first some of the partners viewed BCN's more proactive approach as being potentially meddlesome. Almost all agreed over time, however, that working in partnership with a donor that is truly interested in helping a project maximize its conservation impact and learning is preferred over a traditional grants program that relies on occasional reporting and pro-forma site visits. Most of us feel that we will endeavor to try a similar approach in the future. We're hooked.
The Future
At a meta level, the process described in this guide represents a hypothesis in and of itself. At this point, we do not know under what conditions a learning program can be most effective. The BCN program was a first iteration from which we learned a great deal; our learning has hopefully been captured in this guide. But there are undoubtedly many ways in which this process can be improved.
We hope that you too will experiment with this approach to programs and that you will adapt our ideas, test them, and share your findings with us. In this way, we can work together to improve this approach and, ultimately, our collective ability to do effective conservation.
BCN (1995) Guidlines for Monitoring and Evaluation of BCN Funded Projects: A Description of the Common Set of Questions That Grantees Need to Address to Assess the Biological, Social, Political, and Economic Impacts of Their Projects. Biodiversity Conservation Network, Washington, DC, USA.
BCN (1997a) Annual Report: Getting Down to Business. Biodiversity Conservation Network, Washington, DC, USA.
BCN (1997b) Biodiversity Conservation Network: Evaluating Issues of Business, the Environment, and Local Communities. A web site a www.BCNet.org.
BCN (1998) BCN Analytical Framework and Communications Strategy. Biodiversity Conservation Network, Washing, DC, USA.
BCN (1999) BCN Final Analytical Results. Biodiversity Conservation Network, Washington, DC, USA.
Gunderson, Lance, C.S. Holling, and S.S. Light (1995) Barriers and Bridges in the Renewal of Ecosystems and Institutions. Columbia University Press, New York, NY, USA.
Lee, Kai (1993) Compass and Gyroscope: Integrating Science and Politics for the Environment. Island Press, Washington DC, USA.
Margoluis, Richard and Nick Salafsky (1998) Measures of Success: Designing, Managing, and Monitoring Conservation and Development Projects. Island Press, Washington DC, USA.
Pirsig, Robert. 1974. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. William Morrow, New York, NY, USA.
Salafsky, Nick (1999) If Only I Knew Then What I Know Now: An Honest Conversation About a Difficult Conservation and Development Project. BSP Lessons from the Field, No. BCN, Biodiversity Support Program, Washington DC, USA.
Salafsky, Nick and Richard Margoluis (1999) Overview of a Systematic Approach to Designing, Managing, and Monitoring Conservation and Development Projects. In K. Saterson, R. Margoluis, and N. Salafsky (eds.) Measuring Conservation Impact: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Project Monitoring and Evaluation. Biodiversity Support Program, Washington DC, USA.
Salafsky, Nick and Lini Wollenberg (In press, World Development) Linking Livelihoods and Consevation: A Conceptual Framework and Scale for Assessing the Integration of Human Needs and Biodiversity.
Salafsky, Nick, Richard Margoluis, and Kent Redford (In preparation) Adaptive Management: A Primer on Its Use for Conservation and Development Projects.
Schon, Donald (1984) The Reflective Practitioner: How Pratitioners Think in Action. Basic Books, New York, NY, USA.
Senge, Peter M. (1994) The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. Currency Doubleday, New York, NY, USA.
About the Biodiversity Support Program (BSP)
The Biodiversity Support Program (BSP) is a consortium of World Wildlife Fund, The Nature Conservancy, and World Resources Institute, 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.
About the Biodiversity Conservation Network (BCN)
A commonly held idea in biodiversity conservation circles is that if local people can benefit economically from using their forests and reefs, then they will take action to conserve them. This idea sounds good in theory, but does it work in practice?
The Biodiversity Conservation Network (BCN), which is part of BSP, has been testing this enterprise-based approach to conservation by doing it. Local communities set up businesses like ecotourism or forest product harvesting that directly depend on biodiversity. By funding and working with 20 such projects across Asia and the Pacific, we have analyzed under what conditions this approach works - and under what conditions it doesn't.
About BSP/BCN Publications and This Guide
Our publications are designed to share what we are learning about how best to achieve conservations while doing it. To accomplish this, we try to analyze both our successes and our failures. We hope our work will serve conservations practitioners as a catalyst for further discussion, learning, and action so that more biodiversity is conserved.
Much of BSP and BCN's work focuses on developing basic principles that can be used by field-based conservation and development practitioners. In addition to writing for practitioners, we are also interested in meeting the needs of other key clients in the conservation and development community, including donors and their grantees. We hope that organizations seeking to develop and implement portfolios of projects find this guide useful.
This guide is closely related to our book Measures of Success: Designing, Managing, and Monitoring Conservation and Development Projects (Margoluis & Salafsky 1998), published by Island Press. Measures of Success is about using the principles of adaptive management at a project level to achieve conservation success. This guide is about applying these same principles at a program level - that is to say, with a collection of projects. Our goal in publishing this guide is to spark people's examination of their own programs and how they can maximize their results and learning in order to enhance our collective knowledge.
This publication was made possible through support provided to BCN by the Office of Development Resources, Bureau for Asia, USAID, under the terms of Cooperative Agreement Number AEP-A-00-92-00043-00 and to BSP by the Global Bureau of USAID, under the terms of Cooperative Agreement Number DHR-5554-A-00-8044-00. The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID.
1999 by World Wildlife Fund, Inc., Washington D.C. All rights reserved. Reproduction of this publication for educational and other noncommercial purposes is authorized without prior permission of the copyright holder. However, WWF, Inc. does request advance written notification and appropriate acknowledgement. WWF, Inc. does not require payment for the noncommercial use of its published works and in no way intends to diminish use of WWF research and findings by means of copyright.
ABOUT THIS GUIDE
This guide is based primarily on approaches that BCN has used over the past five years. It was written by Nick Salafsky and edited by Richard Margoluis. Additional comments were provided by Hank Cauley, Bernd Cordes, Cheryl Hochman, John Parks, and Julie Segre. This guide was "office-tested" by Stuart Burden, Avecita Chicchon, Anu Kumar, and Dan Martin from the MacArthur Foundation and Liz Bennett, John Hart, Mike Hedemark, Arlyne Johnson, and Kent Redford from the Wildlife Conservation Society.
Please cite this publication as:
Salafsky, Nick and Richard Margoluis (1999) Greater Than the Sum of Their Parts: Designing Conservation and Development Programs to Maximize Results and Learning. Biodiversity Support Program, Washington DC, USA.
For more information, to give us feedback, or to order copies, we can be reached at:
Biodiversity Support Program
c/o World Wildlife Fund
1250 24th Street NW
Washington DC 20037, USA
Phone: 202-861-8347
Fax: 202-861-8324
e-mail: BSP@wwfus.org
Web sites: www.BSPonline.org and www.BCNet.org
Credits
Writer: Nick Salafsky
Editor: Richard Margoluis
Copyediting/Production Editing: Trisha Goulet, Susan Grevengoed
Illustrations and Line Art: Anna Bala
Design: Christine Henke
Printing: Kirby Lithographic Company, Inc.
BSP Director of Communications: Sheila Donoghue
BCN Director: Bernd Cordes
BSP Executive Director: Judy Ogelthorpe
Printed on recycled paper.
Funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the United States-Asia Environmental Partnership.
