These included cases in which economic goals trumped conservation, or when there was a lack of political will, changes in political conditions that did not support long-term conservation efforts, or government policies that clashed with conservation objectives. Projects sometimes stalled either because of insufficient money, because the initial sources of funding had ended, or where funding had been misallocated and misappropriated.įinally, some papers reported economic and political reasons. Not communicating information effectively, not understanding or managing expectations, or avoiding difficult questions, was frequent fodder for problems. People’s experiences with past conservation initiatives, such as with corruption, the failure to learn from past experiences, or a sense of alienation, also contributed to failure.Ĭommunication was also key. Conflict, lack of coordination between different stakeholders involved in the project, too many competing interests among different groups, or a lack of trust often led to failure. One leading cause, predictably, was how people interact. Butler/Mongabay.ĭigging into the papers, Catalano found some common causes of project failures emerge. “I think it’s important that we write about our own projects, but it’s less important than getting it written about at all.” Conservation projects are complex and can fail when communication breaks down. at Imperial College London, told Mongabay. “There’s value in both,” Catalano, who worked in the U.S. In only 15 percent of the articles did the authors analyze projects they were directly involved in. In general, the authors of the papers assessed other people’s projects, either through interviews with stakeholders, NGO and government staff involved in the project, or by observing the various people involved. The 59 articles had some common features. Only 59 articles analyzed failures, that is, tried to evaluate why the goals of a project hadn’t been met. She searched for peer-reviewed scientific papers reporting on the social aspects of why conservation projects succeed or fail, and found more than 220 articles discussing project successes. Lead author Allison Catalano’s quest to understand how people talk about failure in conservation began where many research questions do: with a laborious literature review. “We have long argued for evidence-based decisions making,” he said, “but that has almost exclusively, as the paper confirms, been framed in terms of positive evidence, or success stories, with little or no attempt to look at negative evidence, or failures or unexpected and undesired outcomes.” This is totally unsurprising, David Wilkie, director of conservation measures for the Wildlife Conservation Society, who was not involved in the study, told Mongabay. Analysis of failures is uncommon in the peer-reviewed conservation literature, new research says, even though lessons from failures are as valuable as those from successes when trying to understand what works and what doesn’t in conservation. It can lead to strong disillusionment in the real world.”īut it is the “successes” in conservation projects that usually make it into scientific papers and reports. “In fact, it is quite dangerous to propagate that notion among people. “‘Doing’ conservation often means grappling with very wicked problems, often intractable and there are no easy pat solutions - the way many success stories are often told makes it sound very easy and non-controversial and simplistic,” Aparajita Datta, a conservation scientist at the Nature Conservation Foundation based in Mysore, India, told Mongabay. Yet it’s the successes we love talking about. We’ve learned from roadblocks - sometimes we’ve not. We’ve worked on projects far longer than we would have liked to and failed.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |