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The blog of the Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security Program
  • Eye On

    Evaluating Enterprise: Twenty Years of Conservation Through Sustainable Livelihoods

    September 7, 2018 By Daniel Lohmann
    Chitwan National Park Elephant Breeding Center

    “It’s not often that we have the opportunity to go back to a site 20 years later and see what happened,” said Cynthia Gill, Director of USAID’s Office of Forestry and Biodiversity during a recent Wilson Center event on a retrospective evaluation of the “conservation enterprise” approach to biodiversity. Conservation enterprises are income-generating activities that provide social and economic benefits and help meet conservation goals.

    In the Petén region of Guatemala, the Rainforest Alliance is helping to combat rapid deforestation by encouraging  communities to engage in sustainable agriculture and timber harvesting, eco-tourism, environment education, and sound financial management.  In Nepal’s Western Himalayas, USAID partnered with EnterpriseWorks/VITA and the Asian Network for Sustainable Agriculture and Bioresources to teach communities to make handmade paper products, essential oils, and charcoal, which in turn promoted the careful maintenance of forests over previously common and damaging slash-and-burn farming, overharvesting of non-timber forest products, and unmanaged grazing practices. 

    Through the retrospective, USAID evaluated the theoretical basis for cultivating conservation enterprises: that if communities benefit economically from conservation enterprises, their attitudes and behaviors towards biodiversity conservation will improve. The evaluation found that sustaining conservation outcomes requires a wide variety of actors and factors, including strong local leadership, robust measurement, effective evaluation, and the incorporation of new information. According to Diane Russell, a former biodiversity and social science advisor at USAID, the retrospective “provides solid evidence of how [the conservation process] plays out in the real world.”

    The evaluation concluded that efforts were largely effective—when certain enabling conditions were met. For example, a forest and watershed conservation program in Nueva Vizcaya, Philippines, proved very successful: The Kalahan Educational Foundation employed community members in a fruit processing plant, while simultaneously incorporating ecology into local curricula to lay the foundation for local conservation programs.

    By combining an understanding of stakeholder groups within communities and an appreciation for the proper scale of behavioral change, conservation enterprise projects can initiate what Judy Boshoven of USAID’s Measuring Impact contract and a Program Officer at Foundation of Success referred to as a “virtuous cycle,” where livelihoods and biodiversity are mutually reinforcing.

    Boshoven also called for more research “looking at enterprises that have failed to find out why they haven’t lasted.” Vigorous review of program effectiveness can also strengthen outcomes. For example, participants in the International Gorilla Conservation Program’s (IGCP) efforts to establish eco-lodges and community camps in Bwindi-Mgahinga expressed contrasting opinions of the program’s efficacy. While one stakeholder insisted that the livelihood support provided by the program was crucial, another argued that inequitable benefit distribution undermined its efforts. As a result, IGCP is taking steps to adaptively manage the program and improve its effectiveness.

    “Conservation enterprises are not a silver bullet,” said Gill, “but when you build on evidence, and a foundation of community and commitment, they can be a part of the solution.”

    Sources: Asia Network for Sustainable Agriculture and Bioresources, Bwindi Mgahinga Conservation Trust, Indigenous Affairs, Natural Resources Management and Development Portal, Rainforest Alliance, U.S. Agency for International Development

    Photo Credit: Chitwan National Park Elephant Breeding Center. Sauraha, Chitwan District, Nepal, November, 2017. Photograph by Jason Houston for USAID

    Topics: community-based, conservation, development, eco-tourism, economics, environment, Eye On, featured, Guatemala, Nepal, Philippines
    • tiddas

      I can’t think of a better model of diplomacy for the modern world than helping other nations save their ecosystems.

    • Andrew Mack

      The sample appears to be biased, because the evaluation does not go back and evaluate the large number of no longer existing projects that failed. Many projects have failed in the past 20 years, so if you only look at the surviving projects you have biased the evaluation. A more valid approach would be to randomly select from all the projects that were underway >20 years ago and evaluate where they are now.

      If you are evaluating a drug therapy for cancer, if you only look at the survivors 20 years later, you might conclude the therapy worked pretty well. I think we repeat failures in conservation because we do not adequately acknowledge and evaluate our failures.

      • Megan Hill, USAID

        Hi Andy,

        Thank you very much for your comment. Yes, we agree that the design of this Retrospective focused on sites that were still successfully implementing conservation enterprises approach decades later and does not include a counterfactual or any kind of randomization of site selection like an impact evaluation would. As the author notes in the blog, we agree it would be informative to also look at enterprises that did not last and understand better why. We appreciate the need to learn from our failures. For this Retrospective, we wanted to understand the conditions that contributed to the sustainability of the enterprises and the conservation outcomes within the context of our generalized theory of change. We wanted to learn from their success in a type of “bright spot” approach so we could share it with others. Given your many years of experience with conservation enterprises I would love to hear more about what you think about the report!

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