Conservation Planning

The Nature Conservancy has been working for decades to achieve “leverage” or produce “highly-leveraged outcomes.” While we have great examples of effective “leveraged” strategies that have yielded “tangible lasting results at scale” (e.g., Debt for Nature swaps, US conservation bond initiatives, Parks in Peril) and many newer strategies that show great promise (e.g., REDD+, Development by Design), we haven’t been consistent at illuminating the paths taken or consciously designing for achieving outcomes at the scales we aspire or the scale that is needed to make significant progress towards our mission.

The Conservancy’s smart and motivated staff often has great ideas and they work incredibly hard to make them real but, again (with notable exceptions) we don’t always think as carefully or methodically about how to bring our idea to scale. Instead we have often been guilty of an “if we build it they will come” notion of how our great innovation will meet its potential.

In this paper we advance some basic ideas and conceptual approaches to help us be more purposeful and intentional in designing our projects to have greater scale impacts. We have borrowed heavily from an exciting body of literature coming out of the social services sector and the philanthropy community, both of which are actively exploring, researching and writing about what they call “scaling up” or “scaling impacts.” We find their ideas very valuable and applicable to our field; understanding and building from some of their work as well of our history may help us get better at designing for impacts at greater scales.