It is easy to track change in a field of crops; to measure, for example, whether certain practices are leading to higher yields or fewer pests. It is far harder to evaluate the impact of large-scale conservation programmes on the environment and people’s lives. However, an approach initiated by CIFOR and developed by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) offers a promising new way of assessing changes in landscapes where conservation, farming and development jostle one another.

WWF was among the first organisations to launch integrated conservation and development projects (ICDPs), which have the dual aims of furthering conservation and improving local livelihoods. While some ICDPs have been successful, others have run into trouble, often because of poor design.

‘CIFOR research has shown that when designing these projects conservation agencies have often failed to recognise that there are important trade-offs to be made between biodiversity conservation and livelihood improvement,’ says Bruce Campbell, CIFOR researcher.

Together with Jeff Sayer, formerly Director General of CIFOR and now science advisor to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Campbell began to look for a new way of investigating the impact of conservation projects and making the trade-offs more explicit. The result was the Landscape Outcomes Assessment Methodology (LOAM), first tested in three African countries in 2003 and 2004, and now widely used by WWF.

‘We’ve found that [LOAM] is a good way of getting people to share their understanding of landscape processes. It gets them on to the same wavelength, even if they start with very different visions about how they would like the future to be.‘

Jeff Sayer
Science advisor, IUCN

LOAM provides a framework for tracking change by working with local organisations and individuals, who identify a range of indicators that can be used to measure change. The indicators are grouped into five categories, based on capital assets. These are human assets, such as access to education and healthcare; social assets, such as village environmental committees; economic assets, such as household income and access to credit; physical assets, which might include the quality of housing and access to clean water; and conservation assets, covering everything from biodiversity to environmental services, from forest quality to the availability of non-timber forest products.

‘This is not a traditional monitoring and evaluation exercise,’ says Sayer, ‘it is a learning process, both for WWF and for all those who attend the workshops. The idea is to encourage people to develop a shared understanding of what goes on in a landscape, and choose indicators that will enable them to track the impact of conservation and development programmes over time. We’ve found that this is a good way of getting people on the same wavelength, even if they have very different visions about how they would like the future to be.’

At many of the sites where WWF has been working there have been several rounds of workshops and assessments.

‘We try to check what’s happened since our last visit and adapt conservation interventions to take account of the findings,’ says Sayer.

In some areas, LOAM has led to changes in the activities and outlook of government departments and conservation agencies. Take for example, the Tri-National de la Sangha Conservation Area (TNS) on the borders of Cameroon, the Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic.

Here, conservation organisations like WWF have used LOAM to investigate the relationship between forest conservation and local livelihoods in a large area which includes national parks, production forests, farmland and mining operations. A series of workshops enabled conservation agencies, government departments, local organisations and local forest users to share their ideas on the optimal balance between conservation and development. They agreed on their preferred scenarios for the future and worked out how to track progress towards their goals.

Sayer says that the research led to a better understanding of landscape dynamics and stimulated a vigorous debate about trade-offs between conservation and development. Conservation organisations working in TNS are working more efficiently as a result of the LOAM process. The discussions found that corruption was a major obstacle, with some local officials creaming off funds that should have gone to conservation activities designed to generate income for local people. A set of governance indicators, established at the workshops, shone a spotlight on this corrupt behaviour and led to increased civil society pressure to reduce corruption.

WWF is using LOAM to explore the impact of development projects. For example, in 2008 WWF facilitated two workshops in the Uruguayan pampas, bringing together representatives of a plantation company, farmers, teachers, local officials, unemployed people and rural workers. The aim was to assess the possible impacts of a major plantation programme. The workshops revealed how different interest groups viewed the prospect of development, and what kind of landscape they wanted in the future. An evaluation by WWF suggests that when LOAM is used like this it can help to defuse potential conflict.

Web links: http://www.ifc.org/ifcext/sustainability.nsf/AttachmentsByTitle/
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LandscapeOutcomesAssessmentMethodology.pdf