Doing Conservation Better:
BSP's Analysis and Adaptive Management Program

The Analysis and Adaptive Management (AAM) Program developed tools to do conservation better and to understand the conditions under which certain conservation strategies are most effective. AAM's work was guided by an analytical agenda based on what BSP believed to be the five conditions necessary for success in conservation:

• Clarity of conservation goals and objectives.


• Equitable and effective social processes and alliances for conservation.
• Appropriate incentives for biodiversity valuation and conservation.
• International, national, and local policies supportive of conservation.
• Sufficient awareness, knowledge, and capacity to conserve biodiversity.

(Described in What Does It Take to Make Conservation Work? (pub. no.80), available in Spanish (pub. no.93) and French (pub. no.114).

AAM Projects and Publications

AAM's analytical work and results focused on five research projects:

• Decentralization and Partnerships for Biodiversity Conservation
  
  Shifting The Power: Decentralization and Biodiversity Conservation (pub. no.100) is accompanied by six cases studies from Bolivia (available in Spanish pub. no.84), Guatemala (pub. no.88 ; available in Spanish pub. no.87), Mexico (pub. no.89), Panama (pub. no.90), and Botswana (pub. no.85).

• Adaptive Management of Conservation and Development Projects


Adaptive Management: A Tool for Conservation Practitioners (pub. no.112) provides an overview of the process, principles, and conditions for achieving adaptive management at the project level.
Measures of Success: Designing, Managing, and Monitoring Conservation and Development Projects (available from Island Press, http://www.islandpress.org) is a practitioners "how-to" guide to project design, management, and monitoring (available in Spanish pub. no.179).

Greater Than the Sum of Their Parts: Designing Conservation and Development Programs to Maximize Results and Learning (pub. no.56) describes how to implement adaptive management and set up learning portfolios at the program level (available in Spanish pub. no.82).

Is Our Project Succeeding? (pub. no.111) describes a practical, low-cost option for measuring conservation project success.

Measuring Conservation Impact (pub. no.48) provides case studies of adaptive management in practice.

Adaptive Management: Transforming Theory into Practice (pub. no.112) is a university or masters level course curriculum for teaching the adaptive management of conservation and development projects.

Keeping Watch: Experiences from the Field in Community-based Monitoring (pub. no.50) provides a field perspective on community-based monitoring (available in Spanish pub. no.52 and French pub. no.51). AAM also supported the Biodiversity Conservation Network (BCN) in its adaptive management work. Products include the BCN Final Analytical Results and the Final Stories from the Field.
• Institutional Arrangements: The Role of Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs)


In Good Company: Effective Alliances for Conservation (pub. no.91) is a study on the role of NGOs and the characteristics of effective alliances in conservation. A companion publication to this product is a complete Literature Review (pub. no.92) that provides valuable insights and analysis.
• The Role of Sustainable Agriculture in the Conservation of Biodiversity
  

Maximum Yield? Sustainable Agriculture As a Tool for Conservation (pub. no.113) presents the results of AAM's work on the conservation benefits of sustainable agriculture with two partner organizations from Mesoamerica (available in Spanish pub. no.117). The case studies from Línea Biósfera in Mexico and Defensores de la Naturaleza in Guatemala support AAM's analysis on this topic.
• Health and Conservation


An Ounce of Prevention: Making the Link between Health and Conservation (pub. no.109) is the result of collaboration with the Healthy Communities Initiative of Conservation International.

Two crosscutting, retrospective studies offer lessons drawn from BSP's regional experiences:

• Capacity Building and Institutional Strengthening

Positive Reinforcements: A Review of Some of BSP's Experiences with Building Capacity for Conservation (pub. no.94)
• Building Effective Portfolios of Projects

A Vested Interest: BSP Experiences with Developing and Managing Grant Portfolios (pub. no.110)

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Lessons from the Field

Using BSP's portfolio of projects in Africa and Madagascar, Asia and the Pacific, Eastern Europe, and Latin America and the Caribbean to capture lessons learned, AAM's Lessons from the Field Series provides short, summary analyses of conservation topics of importance to conservation practitioners:

• What Does It Take To Make Conservation Work?
(pub. no.80) (Spanish pub. no.93 or French pub. no.114)

• Who Should Be Making Decisions? (pub. no.101)
(Spanish pub. no.115 or French pub. no. 136)

• How Can We Work Together? (pub. no.102) (Spanish pub. no.116 or French pub. no.137)
  

Finally, from 1994 to 1996, the AAM Program handled BSP's Conservation Impact Grants Program, which focused on applied, field-based research.

Some of BSP's work in developing practical tools and determining effective conservation methodologies is being continued by Foundations of Success (http://www.fosonline.org), a nongovernmental organization dedicated to improving the practice of conservation.

We hope that you find the fruits of the AAM Program useful in your work and we wish you well in your conservation efforts.