Mainstreaming Impact Evaluation in Nature Conservation

By K. Baylis, J. Honey-Rosés, J. Börner, E. Corbera, D. Ezzine‐de‐Blas, Paul J. Ferraro, R. Lapeyre, U. M. Persson, A. Pfaff, Sven Wunder. 2016

404 citations recorded by the source corpus.

An important part of conservation practice is the empirical evaluation of program and policy impacts. Understanding why conservation programs succeed or fail is essential for designing cost‐effective initiatives and for improving the livelihoods of natural resource users. The evidence we seek can be generated with modern impact evaluation designs. Such designs measure causal effects of specific interventions by comparing outcomes with the interventions to outcomes in credible counterfactual scenarios. Good designs also identify the conditions under which the causal effect arises. Despite a critical need for empirical evidence, conservation science has been slow to adopt these impact evaluation designs. We identify reasons for the slow rate of adoption and provide suggestions for mainstreaming impact evaluation in nature conservation.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/570fbc1a2c7927e13387c3be54324532e731924b

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

In Global and Planetary Change

Citations in the corpus

What are the effects of nature conservation on human well-being? A systematic map of empirical evidence from developing countries (2016, background): “Applications of rigorous impact evaluation methods in conservation remains limited relative to efforts more broadly on conservation performance measurement [4, 15, 16].”
Bridging funding gaps for climate and sustainable development:Pitfalls, progress and potential of private finance (2018, background): “What we are proposing here is not new, but simply an extension of similar calls to develop a more synthesized and robust evidence base for conservation and development interventions (see for example Fisher et al., 2014; Baylis et al., 2016).”
A Critical Comparison of Conventional, Certified, and Community Management of Tropical Forests for Timber in Terms of Environmental, Economic, and Social Variables (2017, background): “, access to forest resources)? (3) What are the major information gaps that should be filled by rigorous impact assessments (Baylis et al. 2015)?”
The Effectiveness of Payments for Environmental Services (2017, positive): “To understand the true effect of PES programs, scholars are pushing the PES literature to adopt counterfactual-based evaluation approaches and construct a systematic evidence base, such as in medical or development research (Baylis et al., 2016; Ferraro, 2011; Pattanayak et al., 2010).”
Poor availability of context-specific evidence hampers decision-making in conservation (2020, background): “Evaluation of interventions should become mainstream, both as a topic of academic research and as an activity for on-the-ground conservationists (Baylis et al., 2016).”