Conservancy leadership has been rightfully challenging TNC’s staff to think strategically. Our leaders now urge us to develop approaches and plans that incorporate new perspectives on financial mechanisms, corporate partnership opportunities and nature’s benefits to people. It’s a call that makes sense. We need to step up if the Conservancy is to sustain and enhance conservation impacts in a rapidly changing world.
However, Conservancy staff are often ill-prepared to think in these new ways. We’re largely still fixated on methods and tools as being the key to open the door to strategic thinking, that address all challenges in the universe. We live and breathe these methods and tools: ecoregional assessments (ERA); conservation action planning (CAP) guidance and workbooks; ConPro; Miradi, Marxan, Invest, etc. In fact, our fetish for tools has replaced our asking the big questions that should be guiding our work — and that would have guided the selection and use of appropriate methods and tools to address those questions in the first place.
But there is hope now, isn’t there? After all, the Conservancy is now moving to a set of better questions to drive our planning (and is reportedly adopting some new methods and tools to support that planning). The Conservancy’s Planning Evolution Team (PET) has come out with a recommended set of questions and mix of new versions of existing tools and methods, all to help elucidate and evaluate broader scale strategies. And the Conservancy’s Strategy Team has produced a set of new guiding questions (with many links to CAP and other strategy and project planning materials) in an interim guidance document for business planning that is being tested and refined. I am confident these steps will serve to strengthen and clarify our place- and area-based strategies and investments, and I applaud those efforts. They are providing some great advances for these realms of planning.
The question remains, however: Are these questions, methods and tools — which are useful for our current strategy thinking — also going to be useful for strategic thinking? Let me be clear: Tools and methods such as CAP are indeed still necessary for our work, and we should continue to use and improve them. These methods and tools give us detailed understanding of conservation targets and the threats to those targets, and they also help us define ways to better the targets through threat reduction or direct improvements in target condition. The whole process has generally given us a detailed sense of what we want to achieve in specific places and how we might achieve it.
However, the Conservancy now faces challenges that require thinking beyond place-based strategy development. And the strategic thinking we now need to address those challenges requires different expertise, perspectives, approaches and tools. But many TNC staff largely continue to think that the same or similar questions, tools and methods for strategy planning address all needs in all situations at all scales.
The gap between the way we now think and the way we need to think (and the approaches we need for the future) becomes painfully clear when we talk about leveraging our work through others to greatly enhance our scope and impact. Many people at the Conservancy think leverage is about replicating our work or generating larger areas of conservation through our efforts. In some cases, that assumption might be correct. But leverage is also often a mechanism that moves our work into the hands of others who make it happen in more places than we ever could… and in ways (and with results) that will surprise us.
How do we accomplish leverage? It sometimes results from demonstrating good conservation outcomes that others want to emulate and spread. But it’s probably more often achieved by first identifying the lever or pivot point that will result in exponential expansion of conservation outcomes — and by knowing what might activate that lever.
That catalyst might not be a biodiversity outcome; instead, it might be a financial or social outcome. For instance, our efforts to influence dam operations on the Yangtze River in China have the goal of providing more natural flows to sustain a significant proportion of the native freshwater biodiversity in the river’s basin. But what moves the lever is the potential for hundreds of millions of dollars in additional annual hydropower revenues that are expected to result from managing dams with more natural flows. It takes a strategic approach to identify and move such a lever — an understanding of how to catalyze policy, corporate partnerships and global commitments that will ultimately result in large-scale biodiversity and socioeconomic changes. Getting there requires a process beyond understanding only those strategies that address specific conservation targets, objectives or percentages in biodiversity change.
The good news is that the Conservancy already thinks strategically. For instance, much of the work being done in the Conservancy’s Freshwater Focal Area — water funds, corporate water stewardship, environmental flow policy, our Sustainable Rivers Partnership with the Army Corps of Engineers, global water certification, hydropower certification, Hydropower by Design, the Great Rivers Partnership — all came out of strategic thinking, not from place-based strategy development approaches, methods and tools.
How were these new approaches developed? Through honest and open discussions that were not driven by tools, methods or a need for broad workshop participant consensus. Groups of strategic thinkers came together to ponder how to address suites of globally common threats that affect many targets and places. The groups also identified leverage opportunities that could potentially make change at a number of places and scales we have not achieved before in the Conservancy.
Our new challenges demand that we use and test some existing and new approaches for strategic planning and decision making, such as those being created by thinkers such as Michael Quinn Patton. These new approaches break down the constraints of focusing on just targets, threats and detailed objectives, constraints that are imposed by using our existing tools and methods as the basis for strategic thought. We need to remove these constraints for strategic thinking to abound and be successful.
Where are most of our current tools and methods still appropriate? On the ground and in the water for our place-based projects, and where our leveraged approaches make conservation happen. This sequence is already happening in our water funds work and within the Sustainable Rivers Partnership, among others. We continue to use CAP, regional assessments, multi-objective planning and ecosystem-based management tools, and others.
But the Conservancy needs to stop pretending that our existing tools, methods and even the majority of our expertise serve as a basis for all of our needs for strategic planning and decisionmaking. A strategic conservation approach to win in the new world order requires much, much more.
By Jonathan Higgins, Applied Scientist, Global Freshwater Team, The Nature Conservancy