Insight, part of a Special Feature on Exploring Opportunities for Advancing Collaborative Adaptive Management (CAM): Integrating Experience and Practice Results Chains: a Tool for Conservation…
By R. Margoluis, Caroline J. Stem, Vinay Swaminathan, Marcia Brown, Arlyne Johnson, G. Placci, N. Salafsky, Ilke Tilders. 2013
124 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Every day, the challenges to achieving conservation grow. Threats to species, habitats, and ecosystems multiply and intensify. The conservation community has invested decades of resources and hard work to reduce or eliminate these threats. However, it struggles to demonstrate that its efforts are having an impact. In recent years, conservation project managers, teams, and organizations have found themselves under increasing pressure to demonstrate measurable impacts that can be attributed to their actions. To do so, they need to answer three important questions: (1) Are we achieving our desired impact?; (2) Have we selected the best interventions to achieve our desired impact?; and (3) Are we executing our interventions in the best possible manner? We describe results chains, an important tool for helping teams clearly specify their theory of change behind the actions they are implementing. Results chains help teams make their assumptions behind an action explicit and positions the team to develop relevant objectives and indicators to monitor and evaluate whether their actions are having the intended impact. We describe this tool and how it is designed to tackle the three main questions above. We also discuss the purposes for which results chains have been used and the implications of their use. By using results chains, the conservation community can learn, adapt, and improve at a faster pace and, consequently, better address the ongoing threats to species, habitats, and ecosystems.
Subfields: Ecological Modeling
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c52fb9620a1cc26ad1bd877eba9171046b9fc160
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In Ecological Modeling
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): “These are also referred to as theory of change models or results chains [26, 57].”
- To Achieve a Sustainable Blue Future, Progress Assessments Must Include Interdependencies between the Sustainable Development Goals (2020, background): “Results chains, sensu Salafsky and Margoluis,(74) provide a transparent approach for tracking these hypothesized relationships and iterations in our understanding (Figures 4A and 4B) and visually representing theories of change and the relationships between specific actions, the intermediate effects”