Strategies

Determining which strategies to implement is arguably the most important step in the conservation planning process. Yet, all too often, project teams select strategies based on what they know how to do, their own experience, and even best guesses – not necessarily using the evidence base and assessing what is most strategic to achieve their goals with the resources they have available. For example, if the organization has skills in environmental education, they will select to work with school children in education. Or if there are team members who have experience running alternative livelihoods projects, they might select to engage communities in an income generation activity related to non-timber forest products. While this might seem like a good idea, the problem is that this approach is driven by the supply of skills and expertise available rather than by what drivers and threats need to be addressed in the project situation to achieve their goals for ecosystem and species conservation.

How To

These steps involve using evidence to determine and prioritize key intervention points, and then brainstorm and select strategies. These processes are very interrelated, and an iterative approach will prove valuable to decision making. In practice, you may find this means that sometimes you are brainstorming at the broader strategy level, sometimes you are brainstorming at the more specific strategy level, and sometimes you are doing a little of both.

Identify intervention points

Earlier, you developed a situation analysis that describes what you want to conserve (your conservation targets), your goal (to improve target viability), the main direct threats to your targets, and the factors (indirect threats and opportunities) that are influencing your direct threats. Strategic planning involves using your situation analysis to determine where you will intervene (key intervention points) – and also where you will not. The first decision you must make in determining your intervention points is to prioritize the factors in your project context that will be most strategic for you to influence. You can use your situation model as a tool to identify and discuss possible intervention points. Your intervention points in the model might be on the target itself (i.e., restoration strategy), the direct threat to the target (i.e., threat abatement strategy), and/or the indirect threats and opportunities affecting the direct threats (e.g., political, social, economic, or livelihood strategies). Generally, your intervention points in the situation model should be on factors that affect your high-rated threats and, ideally, on factors that have high leverage potential (i.e., if mitigated, they could have positive effects on many factors in your model).

Isolate the chain of factors affecting a prioritized threat and brainstorm strategies

Select one of your highly rated threats (ideally a relatively simple one to start with), and isolate the chain of factors contributing to this threat, as shown in Figure 2. Draw on information from your situation analysis to consider the stakeholders and their behaviors that influence this threat. Use available evidence to understand what may be needed to reduce this threat to achieve the goal for the target.

The process of identifying where to specifically intervene in the context of your project helps you narrow down potential strategies. You may need to brainstorm a list of options and then select which strategies would be most effective given the situation. The IUCN-CMP Taxonomy of Conservation Actions, available on the Conservation Standards website, provides a classification of strategies that can be helpful for brainstorming strategies that you could potentially use at various intervention points along this chain. At this point, it may be helpful to include all strategies your team generates, regardless of how feasible they seem in order to encourage creative solutions.

In our marine example, the team chose to brainstorm strategies related to illegal shark fishing. When considering their stakeholder groups, the team determined that this demand is driven by four different stakeholder groups (companies that purchase shark fins, companies that sell them wholesale, the restaurants that serve them to consumers, and the consumers themselves). So, they could potentially intervene by trying to restrict shark fin exports from producing countries, or by working to reduce demand in Asian markets (Figure 3). Alternatively, they could also work to improve law enforcement in order to directly stop the illegal fishing or the illegal sale of the shark fins to wholesalers or restaurants. When brainstorming, it is helpful to not limit your thinking and keep in mind what other programs may be implementing. In many circumstances, if another group is already implementing a strategy and doing it well, it may make sense to note that in your model, for example, using another font color. In brainstorming strategies, you may discover missing factors or unclear relationships and need to add them to your analysis and model.

You may want to ensure that all of your strategies are at approximately the same level of complexity and one is not a component of another, broader strategy. For example, if you have a strategy to gain legal protection for high conservation value wetlands in your site and another to create a protected area for one specific wetland in your site, then the second “strategy” should be a specific activity within the first. We will discuss defining activities in upcoming steps.

Your team should use this opportunity to consider new strategies – not simply continuing what actions you have implemented in the past. The situation analysis is an opportunity to take advantage of your understanding of the project context and think beyond your traditional focus.

Narrow down your strategies for each threat by eliminating strategies that are not likely to have an impact or be feasible

After analyzing your situation, including the stakeholders and their behaviors, you may identify several key intervention points that you feel you need to affect and several potential strategies for each. Depending on the human, financial, and political resources available to your project, you will likely have to limit what you can directly affect. Selecting which factors to address and which strategies to use to affect them can seem like a daunting task. For each priority threat, however, you will probably be able to identify a limited set of strategies that are likely to have the highest impact and feasibility, in terms of resources needed and available for the project.

Rating on impact and feasibility will give you an initial prioritization, but you may want to consider other criteria to make your final choice. A common criterion teams use is whether there is already another group implementing a strategy and doing it well. If so, you might be better off focusing your efforts elsewhere. You may also want to consider your narrowed down list of strategies in terms of costs. The feasibility criterion touches on this, but you may want to explicitly compare your finalized strategies and their costs next to one another. In addition to potential impact and feasibility, we recommend a third criterion to do this second prioritization process: niche/gap the strategy would fill – the extent to which your strategy will fill a gap not addressed by another project or organization.

You may find that you have the perfect strategy to address a particular threat, but another team is already implementing that strategy and doing it effectively. If this is the case, you need to consider whether your resources would be better spent implementing a different strategy or addressing a key intervention point where nothing is currently being done, or whether you could support existing work. You ideally want to choose intervention points where you can add the most value for conservation in general.

Analyze and rank the strategies for all high-rated threats

You now have a narrowed-down list of strategies for addressing the greatest threats to your targets. Still, it is likely this list will have more strategies than you can realistically implement with your project resources. At this point, it may be helpful to do another prioritization process. Depending upon your project’s needs, you could narrow down the strategies under consideration through additional information gathering on their relative potential impact and feasibility. You may need to keep in mind that some strategies work in combination to reduce threats and improve the viability of targets, so you may need to think back from targets and priority threats to prioritize combinations of strategies.

Other prioritization methods include a team discussion, and/or a relative ranking exercise. A discussion with your team may take less time, but a more formal ranking process may help your team more objectively consider and choose from the different strategies. It will also force you to compare strategies to one another and systematically rank them on key criteria.

Whether you do a formal ranking exercise or have a less structured discussion with your team, your analysis should include the same criteria as you used for your initial rating exercise. The difference here is that you will rank each strategy relative to the other strategies under consideration. By doing so, you will be forcing yourselves to create a spread among a suite of strategies that have all passed an initial screening.

To do a relative ranking, you should create a matrix like the one in Table 1 with the strategies in the rows and the criteria in the columns (Note: this ranking process is not currently supported in Miradi – you will need to do it manually or using some other software program). Begin ranking your strategies in terms of potential impact by giving the strategy you think is likely to have the greatest impact the highest ranking (e.g., a 6 if you have 6 strategies) and the one likely to have the lowest impact a 1. Continue ranking the remaining strategies until you have completed the potential impact column. Repeat the same process for ranking the strategies according to feasibility and gap/niche. Sum the numbers up by column and rows. The strategy with the highest number is your best strategy and one you should probably undertake. Likewise, the strategy with the lowest number is one that, with limited resources, you should probably not undertake. To complete a relative ranking matrix, it is often easiest to identify which strategy should get the highest rank for a particular criterion and which should get the lowest rank. You can then start filling in the middle by choosing the next in line for the second highest or lowest spot.

For the Marine example shown in Table 1, the team determined that the promotion of sustainable open-ocean fishing techniques and the promotion of spill mitigation techniques (Strategies D and G, respectively) offer the greatest potential to mitigate priority threats. Other potentially useful strategies might be awareness raising and media campaigns directed at consumers of shark fin soup, as well as restaurants and companies that buy shark fins. The team also determined that lobbying the shipping industry and government ministries to redirect international shipping routes is not likely to be an effective strategy, relative to the others that the project can consider (remember that all strategies here did make a first cut for feasibility and effectiveness, and the team is now comparing its available options).

It is important to keep in mind that strategy ranking is just a tool to narrow down your strategies and that you should use available evidence, including your team’s knowledge of the context, to inform your analysis and final decision-making. For example, in the case above, the team might decide that, in addition to promoting sustainable open-ocean fishing techniques and promoting spill mitigation techniques, it can take on one more strategy. Based on the relative ranking, the team would likely choose from three strategies – international media campaign, national awareness raising campaign, and influencing migration policy. Of these three, the team may choose to take on the international media campaign to reduce shark fin soup consumption because it is at the root cause of the threat and the team has strong ties to a Chinese conservation organization that has been very successful in its awareness campaigns. Thus, it is important to bring your knowledge of the context and your circumstances to help you decide which strategy to implement. In some cases, you may pick a lower ranked strategy because of other variables that you did not consider in your strategy ranking that make the strategy more desirable for your project. For example, the strategy, although ranked lower, potentially reinforces the potential of other selected strategies to work together as a set to mitigate threats and sustain desired change in the context of the project.

Select your final set of strategies

Based on your analysis above, choose your final set of strategies. If you decide to choose any of your lower-ranked draft strategies, you may want to provide a brief explanation of why you did so so that you document your logic. Remember that strategy ranking is merely a tool to help you narrow down your options. You should use evidence, including your knowledge of the context and circumstances, to inform your analysis and final decision.

In addition to using available evidence to select strategies that have high impact and feasibility, the team should also assess the potential for the strategy to result in unintended consequences, for example, to vulnerable people. If there is strong evidence for the assumptions in the situation analysis and that a strategy will be effective at achieving desired outcomes in the project’s context, feasible, and avoid unintended consequences, you may decide to go ahead and implement the strategy at the appropriate scale. However, if the evidence is more mixed or not available, you may wish to manage risk by addressing information needs related to assumptions in your situation analysis, deciding on another strategy with more evidence, or piloting the strategy and generating evidence to assess its effectiveness for your context.

Revisit this list of strategies when developing your work plan and budget (Step 3 of the Conservation Standards)

You now have your set of final strategies, but you do not have your theories of change. You may not have a formal budget in place or all the funds you need to implement all strategies. You will have a better idea of what you need to achieve with each strategy and the set of strategies when you have theories of change. You will also know what you can do when you start developing your work plan and budget. At these points, you should revisit your set of strategies and determine, with the funds you currently have, what is logical to implement first to achieve desired change in the context of your project.

Examples

The following example outlines the strategy selection process for a tropical forest conservation project. Figure 5 shows the situation model for the project scope, with the factor chain for which the team brainstormed potential strategies.

As shown in Figure 6 below, the project team came up with five potential strategies to address the threat of illegal selective logging. Using the strategy effectiveness rating, the team was able to rule out those strategies that would likely be less effective (marked by a red “X”).

Using Table 2, the project team then did a relative ranking of the strategies they considered effective for the entire tropical forest site. These included strategies to address other direct threats and targets. As a result, the highest ranked strategies (‘Community capacity building for forest resource management’ and ‘Strengthen community capacity for interacting with oil companies’) became the final strategies on which the project team chose to focus their efforts and limited resources.

Exercise

1. Identify intervention points in your situation model.
2. For one of your high ranked threats, look at your situation model and isolate the chain of factors affecting this threat. Use Miradi’s "Brainstorm Mode" to isolate the chain.
3. From the extracted factors, identify key intervention points and then brainstorm potential strategies for those intervention points.
4. Repeat the above steps for at least one other high-ranked threat. (Note: Ideally you would do this for all of your high-ranked threats so that you are comparing all strategies under consideration when making final decisions).
5. Do an initial narrowing down of your strategies by rating each on potential impact and feasibility. Based on the rating, decide which strategies to eliminate.
6. Do a relative ranking of the remaining strategies according to 3 criteria (potential impact, feasibility, and gap/niche the strategy would fill).
7. Select the strategies you will implement and write a short paragraph describing the evidence used to select those strategies. In particular, if you had to choose between two similarly ranked strategies, describe how you made that decision.
8. If you are missing any information to select strategies, discuss and describe the implications of implementing strategies without this information and how you intend to manage risk by addressing information needs.
9. Write a short summary (1-2 paragraphs) of your observations about the process in general. Did the results surprise you? Were the results what you expected? Why or why not? Did you have any challenges in applying the ranking? What were the advantages and disadvantages of using a ranking process to select strategies?