The state of capacity development evaluation in biodiversity conservation and natural resource management

Abstract

Capacity development is critical to long-term conservation success, yet we lack a robust and rigorous understanding of how well its effects are being evaluated. A comprehensive summary of who is monitoring and evaluating capacity development interventions, what is being evaluated and how, would help in the development of evidence-based guidance to inform design and implementation decisions for future capacity development interventions and evaluations of their effectiveness. We built an evidence map by reviewing peer-reviewed and grey literature published since 2000, to identify case studies evaluating capacity development interventions in biodiversity conservation and natural resource management. We used inductive and deductive approaches to develop a coding strategy for studies that met our criteria, extracting data on the type of capacity development intervention, evaluation methods, data and analysis types, categories of outputs and outcomes assessed, and whether the study had a clear causal model and/or used a systems approach. We found that almost all studies assessed multiple outcome types: most frequent was change in knowledge, followed by behaviour, then attitude. Few studies evaluated conservation outcomes. Less than half included an explicit causal model linking interventions to expected outcomes. Half of the studies considered external factors that could influence the efficacy of the capacity development intervention, and few used an explicit systems approach. We used framework synthesis to situate our evidence map within the broader literature on capacity development evaluation. Our evidence map (including a visual heat map) highlights areas of low and high representation in investment in research on the evaluation of capacity development.

Donor perspectives on strengthening capacity development for conservation

“…The Capacity Building for Conservation Conference series (in 2013, 2015, 2017 and 2019) has been an important first step in this process. This conference series has resulted in numerous outcomes, such as new collaborations, new funding relationships, improved communication, as well as the articles comprising this special theme in Oryx focused on conservation capacity development (Appleton et al, 2021; Sandbrook et al, 2021; Sterling et al, 2021; Abu-Bakarr et al, 2022; Bruyere et al, 2022; Campagnaro et al, 2022; Chao et al, 2022; Gerrie et al, 2022; Loffeld et al, 2022a,b; O'Connell et al, 2022; Porzecanski et al, 2022).…”

The power of woman-to-woman mentorship in creating long-term changes in biodiversity conservation in Southeast Asia

“…Despite mentorship being deemed an essential complement to training programs to equip early-career scientists for future success (Sterling et al, 2021;Chao et al, 2022), we were often told by Indonesian students that they are unfamiliar with what "mentorship" entails. If a limited number of mentors are available, students may agree to work on advisor projects but never gain the ability to have one-on-one career-oriented conversations with the advisor, much less lead their own research projects and develop their own interests.…”

Professional development in conservation: an effectiveness framework

“…Other than wider evaluations of capacity development approaches (Sterling et al, 2021), as far as we are aware, to date, there have been no specific systematic reviews of professional development in conservation. Attempts to link professional development directly to conservation impact risk oversimplification, because there are many steps influenced by contextual factors, and conservation success may not be attributed to a single professional development initiative.…”