About this Guide

This guide provides detailed information on taking steps to assess the situation and plan conservation projects and programs. It is based on the Conservation Measures Partnership’s Conservation Standards for the Practice of Conservation (Conservation Standards). Materials in this guide have been adapted from previous works produced by Foundations of Success (FOS) and members of the Conservation Measures Partnership (CMP).

To provide feedback or comments, you can contact FOS at info@FOSonline.org. Visit our website at www.FOSonline.orgto find other resources. A PDF version of this guide is currently in development. Please cite this work as: Foundations of Success. 2020. Planning for Conservation: A How-To Guide.

Use of this Material

This work is licensed for use under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Under this Creative Commons license, you may take the manual and adapt or modify it as you see fit, provided you a) reference the original manual (but not in any way that suggests that FOS endorses this derived work), and b) issue the derived work under a similar Creative Commons license or equivalent. You can also formally contribute your modifications to FOS, who will consider incorporating them in a future official version of the manual. This process ensures that the manual constantly evolves through the input of a wide variety of practitioners, is adaptable to individual organizations’ needs, and yet provides a carefully managed global resource for conservation work.

Overview

This guide provides detailed information to help conservation teams assess the situation within which they are working and plan conservation projects and programs. It is based on the Conservation Measures Partnership’s Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation (Conservation Standards). These standards involve five steps designed to help teams improve the effectiveness of their conservation efforts (Figure Cycle):

To complement the Conservation Standards, Foundations of Success developed this guide to support steps 1 and 2. The guide provides step-by-step guidance, examples, resources, and exercises. Any practitioner or team can learn about the methods and tools to implement the Conservation Standards by using the guide.

The guide is designed to facilitate learning and positively impact your work. By using the guide and practicing the steps, you should become:

• Fluent in the language and literature of conservation planning, evidence-based conservation and adaptive management.
• Familiar with the basic steps of project management.
• Comfortable using several planning tools including, situation models and results chains, and software to facilitate and record outputs, such as Miradi and Miradi Share.
• Familiar with some additional skills sets that are critical in planning and implementing conservation projects, including facilitation, team coordination and external communication with partners.

Step 2

Now that you have completed Step 1 (Assess) of the Conservation Standards, you are ready to start planning your actions and monitoring. Often, if teams even do project planning, this is where they start. While some individuals might have a mental model of what is happening in their context, they have not explicitly shared and agreed upon that model with their team. You, however, should have a clear idea of your vision, what you ultimately want to conserve (your conservation targets), and the evidence for what is affecting their viability. With all of this information at hand, you are in a good position to set relevant goals and objectives and choose strategies that are well-suited for the situation.

In Step 2, you will first develop an action plan and then a monitoring plan. An action plan is a document that pulls together your project’s goals, strategies, their theories of change, objectives, and the specific activities under the strategies. Ideally, it will include the sources of evidence you used to set these goals and objectives and choose your strategies. An action plan could also include your situation model, a text description of the current situation within your scope and how you intend to affect it, your results chains, and any other background material that helps convey what your project will do and why. Your action plan is a core component of your overall strategic plan. Your action plan also forms the foundation for the other two components – your monitoring plan and operational plan (note that this guide does not cover the Operational Plan). Your monitoring plan includes information needs, indicators, methods and responsibilities for collecting data.

The following sections of this guide will introduce you to the various components of an action plan (Step 2A) and a monitoring plan (Step 2B) and some tools that will help you develop them. Your action, monitoring, and operational plans, along with your work plan (described in Step 3 of the Conservation Standards), form your overall strategic plan (Figure 1)