Activities

Ultimately, a conservation project involves taking actions to change the situation where you are working. To implement your strategies and to reach the objectives that you defined in the previous section, you will need to implement activities. As shown in Box 1 below, activities are part of a hierarchy of actions. They are more specific than strategies, which are broad courses of action. At the same time, activities can in turn be broken down into more specific “tasks.” You define your tasks as part of your work plan in Step 3 of the Conservation Standards.

How you classify your actions will depend on the complexity and scope of your project. For example, if you are working on a regional project to conserve cloud forests in Central America, one of your strategies could be to support the legal protection and management of cloud forests. Within this strategy, one of your activities could be to lobby the Guatemalan government to create a new protected area in Huehuetenango. An organization focusing specifically on conservation in Huehuetenango would likely classify your activity (to promote the creation of this new protected area) as a strategy.

How To

Select one of the strategies you developed earlier

Revisit the list of final strategies you identified previously, and select one on which to focus. Refer to the theory of change you developed associated with this strategy.

Define activities to accomplish the strategy and add them to your theory of change

Brainstorm a list of specific activities that your team will need to do to accomplish key results in your theory of change. At this point in the process you will want to be fairly specific, but not focus on detailed tasks.

In the marine example, the strategy to promote sustainable fishing techniques includes the following activities (Figure 1):

• Conduct feasibility tests
• Train fishermen in new techniques
• Identify niche markets for fish

You should note important details about the activities. For example, we have noted that the feasibility tests should analyze the technical and financial feasibility of the sustainable fishing techniques.

Define who will implement the activity and when

Once you have identified your activities, you will need to define who will be responsible for completing each activity and the time frame for doing this work. Technically, this information is part of a work plan, which is included in Step 3 (Implement) of the Conservation Standards. We include the activities portion of your work plan as an optional step at this point, because it flows logically after defining activities. Table 1 includes an excerpt from the Marine Reserve work plan.Table

Repeat steps above for your other strategies

Develop activities for all of your major strategies.

Examples

The following is the example results chain for a campaign to prevent mining in sensitive areas in the Eastern Arcs. As this example demonstrates, you can attach activities to the strategy or place them near results that they will contribute to achieving.

Exercise

1. Using the strategies that you came up with earlier, develop specific activities required to complete these strategies.
2. If you are missing any information to adequately identify activities to implement each strategy, discuss and describe the implications of implementing strategies without this information and how you intend to manage risk by addressing any information needs.