Assessing Collaborative Conservation: A Case Survey of Output, Outcome, and Impact Measures Used in the Empirical Literature

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Authors

Much existing research on collaborative conservation has focused on process, even as researchers have called for greater attention to explaining what results these processes yield. It is time to take stock of collaborative conservation research by mapping what kinds of variables researchers are including in analyses. Here we conduct a case survey from the SCAPE database of environmental decision-making cases. We include cases involving collaboration across government, environmental protection, and resource exploitation interests in western democratic countries. Results reveal patterns in what researchers include in their outputs, outcomes, and impacts measures of collaborative conservation. While there is little difference by publication type (peer-reviewed journals, scholarly book chapters, or gray literature) or over time, we find significant differences in explicit measures across variable types. In particular, variables more proximate to process in a logic chain are more often measured, as are social rather than ecological variables.
Original languageEnglish
JournalSociety and Natural Resources
Volume33
Issue number4
Pages (from-to)442-461
Number of pages20
ISSN0894-1920
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 02.04.2020

Bibliographical note

Funding for this research was provided by the German Research Foundation (DFG) under grant number NE 1207/2–1 “ECOPAG” and by the European Research Council (ERC) through Starting Grant number 263859 “EDGE” to JN.

    Research areas

  • Sustainability Science - case survey, collaborative conservation, logic chain, measures variables
  • Case survey, collaborative conservation, logic chain, measures, variables