Select Strategy or Strategies

Map Strategies and Places
Select Strategy or Strategies

Purpose

Identify strategies that, if successfully pursued, at least meet the minimum goal, and have the greatest ROI.

Products

Selected strategy or strategies, with results chains, and defined expected outcomes

You and your team have done your homework, and now it’s time to decide on a strategy, or possibly multiple strategies. These considerations will help you narrow the field.

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Evaluate potential contribution toward goals for each strategy.

As quantified in the strategy mapping step, compile the anticipated benefits for each minimum goal element for each strategy. If any of these benefits were not quantified in the Strategy Mapping step, quantify them now. A categorical determination of impact is acceptable, but the categories should represent a specific numerical range (e.g. 1,000–5,000 acres of habitat) rather than qualitative categories (high, medium, low). Whatever approach is used, it should be consistent among strategies to facilitate comparison.

Make a table.

Make a table with a row for each strategy and a column for each conservation target and human well-being outcome that can be sorted to see the most impactful strategy for every outcome.

For example, this is a hypothetical table for the marine minimum goal statement used above. Strategy 1 underperformed on coral protection and fishery landing goals, while Strategy 2 met or exceeded all minimum goals.

Avoid low ‘conservation ROI’ strategies.

Conservation ROI is a relative measure, and should be evaluated relative to the other strategies under consideration rather than some absolute threshold. There is no threshold value for ROI that should be targeted. The purpose of considering ROI is to help further screen and prioritize strategies that meet the minimum goal requirements.

Expand your table.

Expand your table to include columns for ROI estimates for each minimum goal element. Continuing the marine example — Strategy 2 has lower impact for grouper population viability and fishery landings when compared to its ROI for protected coral and seagrass, but the ROI of Strategy 2 overall is much higher than Strategy 1. This information can be taken into consideration with other elements in the next steps for strategy selection.

Analyze risk of failure, financial and reputational risk and likelihood of negative impacts on vulnerable people.

Conduct a “pre-mortem.”

Imagine that the strategy is implemented, but ultimately fails. What went wrong? Consider factors both within and outside of the control of the project proponents, including political, financial, unintended consequences, unexpected responses of natural systems, etc.
Assess the evidence that the strategy will work.

Using the evaluation of the strength of evidence compiled in the results chain step, evaluate the cumulative probability that all required steps will work.
Pursue high impact/high risk strategies, with appropriate contingencies.

If many links in a results chain have weak evidence, but the potential ROI and impact are high, consider risk mitigation efforts, and deploy the strategy adaptively with focused monitoring to learn about effectiveness. It is important to ensure, however, that the strategy is not posing a high risk of negative impacts to vulnerable people.
Assess whether required funds will be available, and the consequences of their lack of availability.

Funding resources should have been considered during strategy mapping, but can become more specific in this step. Funding requirements that are not either in line with your previous track record of fundraising or based on committed funds are high risk.
Evaluate reputational risk of partnerships, especially with corporations.

When considering engagement with partners that might pose a reputational risk, such as a corporation, the proposed engagement should advance conservation and have a defined, tangible conservation benefit, that will result in increased benefits to conservation with measurable results within 3–5 years. Conservancy staff should refer to the Corporate Engagement SOP for further guidance on working with corporations.

External Resources

Conservation Partnership Center

“Working with others” is a central tenet of conservation practice today. This site provides guidance, tools, best practices and other resources to help you and your organization enter into and maintain healthy, effective and productive partnerships.

Read More
Eliminate strategies that have unacceptably high risk.

Based on the above evaluations of risk, and any identified earlier in the process, eliminate from further consideration any strategies that have unacceptably high risk.

Compare and select strategy or strategies.

A longer description of approaches of varying complexity that can be used to select strategies is presented in Appendix J.

Consider both ROI and achievement of minimum goal.

First consider ROI, and identify those strategies that have relatively high ROI. Then ask whether those strategies can be scaled to achieve the stated minimum goal. If not, the high ROI strategy might still be pursued, but would need to be supplemented with additional strategies to achieve the minimum goal. For example, eliminating over-application of fertilizer could be a high ROI strategy for reducing nutrient pollution (e.g. by educating farmers to reduce inputs and increase their profits). However, this might only lead to a 10% reduction in nutrient pollution, short of the 40% minimum goal. In this case, consider supplementing the high ROI strategy with additional strategies.
Is any one strategy best against all goals? If so, select that strategy.
If there are tradeoffs among strategies, consider whether some goals are more important than others.

Often there is a primary goal that should be given more weight than others. This can be formalized by assigning weights to each goal through Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (see Appendix J) or you can simply use the minimum goals to select strategies that meet minimum goals for each goal.

Minimum Standard Questions

Will selected strategies, if successful, achieve the minimum conservation goals?
Are investments allocated to strategies with relatively high conservation ROI?
Do high-risk strategies have appropriately high reward if successful? Be sure to evaluate who is bearing the risk and who stands to benefit from the reward.
Are mitigation plans in place for dealing with risks associated with unintended consequences, e.g. reputational risk, and risk of impacts to indigenous peoples and vulnerable populations? Were the mitigation plans developed through a participatory process with the primary stakeholders who may be affected?

FAQS Show All

What if no strategies can be identified that can achieve conservation or human well-being goals ?

What if negative impacts to vulnerable populations cannot be avoided or eliminated?

Select Strategy or Strategies

Evaluate potential contribution toward goals for each strategy.

Make a table.

Avoid low ‘conservation ROI’ strategies.

Expand your table.

Analyze risk of failure, financial and reputational risk and likelihood of negative impacts on vulnerable people.

Conduct a “pre-mortem.”

Assess the evidence that the strategy will work.

Pursue high impact/high risk strategies, with appropriate contingencies.

Assess whether required funds will be available, and the consequences of their lack of availability.

Evaluate reputational risk of partnerships, especially with corporations.

Eliminate strategies that have unacceptably high risk.

Compare and select strategy or strategies.

Consider both ROI and achievement of minimum goal.

Is any one strategy best against all goals? If so, select that strategy.

If there are tradeoffs among strategies, consider whether some goals are more important than others.

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