SPECCS – a Standardized Protocol for Evaluating Community Conservation Success

In achieving global conservation and protected area goals, community-based conservation initiatives offer both an alternative and a complement to strictly protected areas that exclude people. Already, 45% of the world’s... [ view full abstract ]

In achieving global conservation and protected area goals, community-based conservation initiatives offer both an alternative and a complement to strictly protected areas that exclude people. Already, 45% of the world’s protected areas in co-management with local communities, yet it remains controversial whether community-based conservation initiatives can successfully meet both their biological and socio-economic goals over the long-term. The controversy arises in part because to date no standard measure of success has been available. With its goals of nature conservation, poverty alleviation, and local ownership, community-based conservation must provide biological and socio-economic benefits that are linked through effective resilience mechanisms. To quantify success in attaining all three goals, we have developed SPECCS, a user-friendly Standardized Protocol for Evaluating Community Conservation Success that incorporates an appraisal of data quality. The tool is useful in helping individual community-based conservation initiatives track progress over time, in comparing effectiveness among different initiatives, and in evaluating success regionally or globally across different initiatives. It guides users through scoring the performance and data quality for a total of 22 criteria relevant to five elements of success: biological benefits, biological resilience, socio-economic benefits, socio-economic resilience and linkage mechanism that connect biological and socio-economic successes with each other. The tool then returns total and element-specific performance and quality scores expressed as percentages scores in both numeric and graphical form. Our presentation will introduce the conference audience to this tool, familiarizing them with the individual assessment criteria, the tool’s spreadsheet and online Rshiny implementation, data input requirements and evaluation outputs.