Situation Analysis and Model
A situation analysis is a process that will help the project team use available evidence to create a common understanding of the project’s context – including the biological environment and the social, economic, political, and institutional systems that affect your conservation targets. In the previous steps, you conducted a viability assessment and rated the direct threats of your conservation targets. To effectively plan actions to conserve those targets, the team also needs to identify the indirect threats and opportunities that influence those direct threats and the viability of the targets (Box 1). A situation analysis identifies these factors and their relationships to each other. A situation model depicts your situation analysis.
Often project teams think they have a shared understanding of their project’s context, including the main threats and opportunities. As such, this practice is one that is sometimes overlooked – at least, not explicitly carried out – in conservation projects, yet it is essential for effectiveness. In going through a formal process to gather information about the site and using it to document underlying assumptions about the project’s context, however, project teams often find they have somewhat different perceptions of the same situation. For example, biologists tend to focus on the biological aspects of the site, whereas development organizations tend to focus on the socioeconomic aspects. A situation analysis helps all project team members come to a common understanding of your site’s context. Your understanding of the biological and human context will guide you in developing appropriate goals and objectives and designing strategies that will help you achieve them. The challenge here is to make your logic explicit, without spending time and resources on details that are not useful for decision making.
“Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful” - E.P. Box
How To
These steps involve using evidence to identify indirect threats and opportunities to complete a situation analysis and documenting your results using a situation model.
Identify factors influencing direct threats to targets
Identify the economic, political, institutional, social, or cultural factors influencing the direct threats to your conservation targets. Examples of common indirect threats that drive direct threats include weak legislation and enforcement, strong market demand, and limited environmental awareness. Opportunities that are helping to reduce direct threats may include strong legislation, markets for certified products, a high level of awareness of conservation issues, and cultural values that support conservation and sustainable resource management.
Each of the threats and opportunities included in your situation analysis has one or more stakeholders associated with it. Stakeholders are individuals, groups, or institutions that have a vested interest in or can influence the natural resources within the project scope and/or that may be affected by project activities and have something to gain or lose. As you are documenting indirect threats and opportunities, make sure you are also capturing the activities and motivations of each group of stakeholders.
Keep the following questions in mind:
- Who is undertaking what activities that contribute to this direct threat, indirect threat, or opportunity?
- What are their motivations? Are their actions driven by economic dependency (livelihood) or economic advantage? Are these resources replaceable by other resources? Do they have legal jurisdiction over the use of the resource and regulate its use for conservation, economic development, or another purpose? Are they working to conserve the resource? Have they conducted research on the resource?
- How are they engaged in decision making?
The project team can conduct a situation analysis at varying levels of detail, depending on the existing evidence base for the biological, social, economic, political, and cultural factors that influence the direct threats and viability of the targets. For example, a team that has been working for several years on forest management may have strong evidence about the current condition of the forests and the extent to which they are threatened by clearcutting, selective logging, slash-and-burn agriculture, road construction, and other actions. This same team, however, may need to gather information or consult with specialists about issues driving direct threats, such as national and international demand for high value timber, local community livelihood strategies, and how the policy environment influences resource use and extraction. A project team that is just beginning to make programming decisions in a new context will generally need to dedicate more time to assess the situation before planning their project interventions.
A situation analysis can involve anything from a cursory review of existing information and a relatively brief discussion with key informants, to an in-depth analysis of documents and a more lengthy process of consultation with key informants. Because a situation analysis lays the groundwork for all subsequent decisions, reducing uncertainty in your key assumptions is critical. Your team should discuss your level of confidence in your assumptions. If you perceive you may spend too much time and resources gathering information, then it is important to focus on gathering information around the assumptions that could present the greatest implications to the project if they are wrong. You may decide to use time and resources to address the most critical information needs through looking up existing evidence or even generating new evidence if needed to inform the situation analysis.
Build a situation model to visually portray your situation analysis
A situation model is a tool that can help the team visually depict the results of your situation analysis. It maps out a set of causal relationships between factors that are believed to affect the viability of one or more conservation targets. The model should explicitly link the conservation targets to the direct threats affecting them and the factors (indirect threats and opportunities) influencing the direct threats. The model can help teams think through the relationships between factors and, in subsequent steps, consider the potential intervention points for strategies.
The time you will need to work together as a team to build your situation model depends on the complexity of the situation and level of detail that is useful to the team. Some teams spend only a few hours working together, while others spend days.
You may capture your situation model and details in Miradi or other software (Box 3). However, groups (especially larger ones) may prefer to build their situation model on a wall and later input it into Miradi. The process of building the model is generally more dynamic and content focused when all team members can clearly see and actively participate in the model development.
If you use a wall, you can start by adding your project scope, vision, and conservation targets on the far right of your workspace (e.g., large flip chart sheets taped together, a white board, a chalkboard). If you also have ecosystem services and human wellbeing targets, you can add those to the right of your conservation targets as shown in Figure 2.
If relevant, you may also want to show relationships between different targets (e.g., intertidal systems affecting seabirds). Place each threat to the left of the target(s) it affects, and use arrows to connect the threat and target. Add any stresses that you defined earlier. We recommend using different colors for each component as in Miradi (e.g., green cards for targets, pink cards for threats).
If your team identified many direct threats (e.g., more than 10), you may want to leave your low rated threats out of the model – although important, they may be less critical for visualizing in the model when brainstorming intervention points in subsequent steps.
Next, add cards to your model for the indirect threats and opportunities. You should work from right to left to place each of the factors into your model. As a general rule of thumb, we recommend trying to keep your model to 35-40 boxes total. If there are not too many relationships among targets and the threats to them, you may also develop different situation models for targets or sets of targets.
In our marine example, the team identified causes of the direct threat of illegal shark fishing by fishers from the mainland, including international demand for shark fin and weak law enforcement, which they added to the model. They also identified the factors driving those indirect threats and so on, which they added to the model working to the left until the model was reasonably complete (see Figure 3).
Draw arrows in the model to show the relationships among factors. These arrows will help you later to identify critical factors and identify potential paths along which you could establish your project objectives. If there are uncertainties in factors or their relationships, you can note them in the model using question marks and dashed arrows.
As you work, you may have to rearrange, add, delete, or combine cards. Although the process may seem straightforward, you will find that you and your project team will have some lively discussions about what should go where. If you used the wall to develop the model, make sure to capture your work in Miradi or other software (see Miradi Box below). Also make sure to document the discussions of the team as well.
Example
You can document the results of a situation analysis by writing a few paragraphs of text or just a few bullets that summarize each conservation target, the direct threats, and the contributing factors for each target. Here, we provide an example of bulleted text explaining a direct threat to one of the conservation targets in our Marine Reserve site and the indirect threats and opportunities influencing it.
Conservation target: Sharks
Direct threat: Commercial fishers from the mainland not only capture sharks accidentally, as bycatch, but some of them also target sharks. They capture them using primarily longlines. Some of these fishers operate at night. When they capture a shark, they cut off the shark fins and toss the rest of the shark back into the ocean (personal communication with fisheries officers of Fisheries Department, October 15, 2018).
Contributing Factors:
There is strong international demand for shark fin. Shark fin soup is a delicacy in China and Hong Kong. As shark populations have declined worldwide over the past few years, the price of shark fin has increased.
It is illegal for fishers to keep and sell shark products. If sharks are captured as bycatch, the fishers are supposed to return the whole shark to the ocean. When boats come into the municipal dock on the mainland, fisheries officers can check their product and, if they find shark parts, then they are authorized to confiscate them and fine the boat US $500. Law enforcement is weak, however. The Fisheries Department does not have enough personnel, so they only check the boats occasionally. Also, because the boats return to the mainland from a large coastal area and bring in different products (finfish, shrimp, etc.), the fisheries officers are more focused on implementing size limits and closed seasons for commercial fisheries than in enforcing regulations to protect sharks (personal communication with fisheries officers of Fisheries Department, October 15, 2018).
Some fishing boats may sell their shark fins at sea. The park wardens cannot control this because the boats operate outside of the Marine Reserve. The Fisheries Department either does not have the capacity to control this activity or they may be getting paid to look the other way. Since their salaries are low, some fisheries officers supplement their incomes with bribes (personal communication with program officer at Greenpeace, October 20, 2018).
Examples
Our earlier example came from a site-based project, but you can also use situation models effectively for species-focused projects. Figure 4 is an example based on a real-world model developed by a WWF project team seeking to protect Javan rhinos.
Practice
As a practice exercise, look at the following factors and choose the correct category. Category options: scope, target, direct threat, contributing factor, or biophysical factor. See bottom of page for answers.
- Unsustainable fishing
- International markets
- Rivers and streams
- Illegal logging
- Manuripi Wildlife Reserve
- Primary forest
- Lack of social control
- Seedling mortality
- Sustainable economic alternative
- Government regulations
Exercise
- Identify indirect threats and opportunities that contribute to direct threats or directly influence the viability of conservation targets.
- Assess stakeholders and their primary interests related to indirect threats and opportunities.
- Develop an initial situation model.
- In a narrative (1-2 pages) explain your situation model. Describe the model from the right (conservation targets) to the left (direct threats and then contributing factors). Since you already described your conservation targets in a previous section, you can just mention them briefly here. Focus on explaining each direct threat and the indirect threats and opportunities that contribute to it.
- If you are missing any information to adequately describe the situation, discuss and describe the implications of selecting and implementing strategies without this information, and how you intend to manage risk by addressing information needs.
Congratulations!! You have now finished Step 1 of the Conservation Standards.
Conservationtraining.org students can now click here to complete the Step 1 Quiz and click here for Step 2 of the course.
Answers to Practice
- Unsustainable fishing = direct threat
- International markets = contributing factor
- Rivers and streams = target
- Illegal logging = direct threat
- Manuripi Wildlife Reserve = scope
- Primary forest = target
- Lack of social control = contributing factor
- Seedling mortality = biophysical factor
- Sustainable economic alternative = contributing factor
- Government regulations = contributing factor