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- Mahajan, Shauna L., et al.
(författare)
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Accelerating evidence-informed decision-making in conservation implementing agencies through effective monitoring, evaluation, and learning
- 2023
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Ingår i: Biological Conservation. - 0006-3207 .- 1873-2917. ; 286
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Evidence-informed decision-making can help catalyze the development and implementation of effective conservation actions. Yet despite decades of research on evidence-informed conservation, its realization within conservation implementing agencies and organizations still faces challenges. First, conservation decisions are shaped by individual, organizational, and systemic factors that operate and interact across different temporal and spatial scales. Second, the different cultures and value systems within conservation implementing agencies fuels continued debate on what can and should count as evidence for decision-making, and ultimately shapes how evidence is used in practice. While the importance of evidence-informed conservation is increasingly recognized, we have witnessed few changes within conservation implementing agencies that could enable better engagement with diverse types of evidence and knowledge holders. Based on our experience supporting monitoring, evaluation and learning systems in conservation implementing agencies, we argue that to realize evidence-informed conservation we need a better understanding of the process and context of conservation decision-making within organizations, an alignment of institutional systems and processes that generate evidence relevant to information needs, and changes that help conservation organizations become learning organizations. These actions could help transform how conservation practitioners and organizations learn to enable more evidence-informed decision-making within the complex systems they work in.
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| 2. |
- Mahajan, Shauna L., et al.
(författare)
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Introducing Elinor for monitoring the governance and management of area-based conservation
- 2024
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Ingår i: Conservation Biology. - 0888-8892 .- 1523-1739. ; 38:2
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Monitoring the governance and management effectiveness of area-based conservation has long been recognized as an important foundation for achieving national and global biodiversity goals and enabling adaptive management. However, there are still many barriers that prevent conservation actors, including those affected by governance and management systems from implementing conservation activities and programs and from gathering and using data on governance and management to inform decision-making across spatial scales and through time. We explored current and past efforts to assess governance and management effectiveness and barriers actors face in using the resulting data and insights to inform conservation decision-making. To help overcome these barriers, we developed Elinor, a free and open-source monitoring tool that builds on the work of Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom to facilitate the gathering, storing, sharing, analyzing, and use of data on environmental governance and management across spatial scales and for areas under different governance and management types. We consider the process of codesigning and piloting Elinor with conservation scientists and practitioners and the main components of the assessment and online data system. We also consider how Elinor complements existing approaches by addressing governance and management in a single assessment at a high level for different types of area-based conservation, providing flexible options for data collection, and integrating a data system with an assessment that can support data use and sharing across different spatial scales, including global monitoring of the Global Biodiversity Framework. Although challenges will continue, the process of developing Elinor and the tool itself offer tangible solutions to barriers that prevent the systematic collection and use of governance and management data. With broader uptake, Elinor can play a valuable role in enabling more effective, inclusive, and durable area-based conservation.
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