Biological Conservation, 286, 110304
Sep 30, 2023
Accelerating evidence-informed decision-making in conservation implementing agencies through effective monitoring, evaluation, and learning
Shauna L. Mahajan, Lydia Tanner, Gabby Ahmadia, Hannah Becker, Nicole DeMello, Robert Fidler, Alastair R. Harborne, Arundhati Jagadish, Morena Mills, Paul Cairney, Samantha Cheng, Brandie Fariss, Yuta J. Masuda, Mine Pabari, Maria Tengö, Carina Wyborn, Louise Glew
Evidence-informed decision-making can help catalyze the development and implementation of effective conservation actions. Yet despite decades of research on evidence-informed conservation, its realization within conservation implementing agencies and organizations still faces challenges. First, conservation decisions are shaped by individual, organizational, and systemic factors that operate and interact across different temporal and spatial scales. Second, the different cultures and value systems within conservation implementing agencies fuels continued debate on what can and should count as evidence for decision-making, and ultimately shapes how evidence is used in practice. While the importance of evidence-informed conservation is increasingly recognized, we have witnessed few changes within conservation implementing agencies that could enable better engagement with diverse types of evidence and knowledge holders. Based on our experience supporting monitoring, evaluation and learning systems in conservation implementing agencies, we argue that to realize evidence-informed conservation we need a better understanding of the process and context of conservation decision-making within organizations, an alignment of institutional systems and processes that generate evidence relevant to information needs, and changes that help conservation organizations become learning organizations. These actions could help transform how conservation practitioners and organizations learn to enable more evidence-informed decision-making within the complex systems they work in.