Up to Table of Contents

Ahead to LOCAL CHAPTERS REPORT

MAINTAINING THE RESEARCH-IMPLEMENTATION CONTINUUM IN CONSERVATION

BY RICHARD COWLING

Like many members of SCB, I embarked upon a research career that was inspired by a deep love and concern for nature. I did the usual stuff: published papers on the ecology of species and ecosystems, presented research results at long-winded scientific meetings, and supervised a cohort of postgraduate students. Much of our research team's work was applied, in the sense that there were embedded messages about management and conservation. No one seemed to take much notice of these.

Then, in the early 1990s, I accepted an appointment that was explicitly about conservation. By this time, conservation biology was a rapidly ripening discipline and a consciously applied one-indeed, a crisis discipline. Our research became more focused in that we concentrated on problems that we perceived to be important. We researched all sorts of things and some of our papers were even cited. Yet our impact on the ground was slight. This was frustrating.

In the late 1990s, our organization (Institute for Plant Conservation at the University of Cape Town) was awarded a grant to conduct a conservation plan for the terrestrial component of the biota of the Cape Floristic Region. The products were acclaimed by our peers (Balmford 2003) and formed the spatial backbone of the Cape Action for People and the Environment (CAPE) Programme. This program subsequently has attracted a great deal of money from international donors, including the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund and the Global Environment Facility.

We learned many things from our CAPE experience (Cowling and Pressey 2003). Some of these are technical and I won't bore you with the details here (see Driver et al. 2003). The most important, I believe, was the realization-a kind of epiphany for dull-witted natural scientists-that conservation is all about the choices that people make. We realized that as scientists, we need to view ourselves as enablers in a social process: we can provide those who are empowered to make these choices-the implementers-with information that extends the range of options available to them. And our job is to ensure that these include compelling options that safeguard nature rather than discount it. If we are going to be effective, then we need to understand how our study region works, not only ecologically, but also socially and economically. So we have to climb off our academic thrones and work with our stakeholders. These may comprise a wide spectrum of society: farmers, planners, peasants, developers, and officials.

How to do this is an essay topic of its own (for some pointers regarding conservation planning, see Pierce et al. 2005). The important message is that there should exist a research-implementation continuum. Researchers need to work closely with stakeholders, especially those responsible for implementing conservation action, in order to ensure that their products are user-useful and user-friendly. This is not trivial, because these stakeholders may come from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds and be associated with many different sectors, some of which traditionally have scant regard for nature. Feedback from stakeholders enables conservation scientists to continually fine-tune their approaches and products, thereby making them more useful and effective.

But in the main, we don't do this. Instead, we persist in overwhelming ourselves with increasingly sophisticated analyses of the same problems. Our research may end up in high-impact journals, and draw all sorts of accolades from our peers, but it seems to do very little to safeguard nature. As Andrew Knight puts it, "We have become mired in an implementation crisis" (Knight et al. in press). By acknowledging the need for a research-implementation continuum and, indeed, the existence of a conservation-action pathway that encompasses everything from data collection to on-the-ground action (Knight et al. in press), we may yet be able to drag ourselves out of this crisis.

But this research-implementation feedback works both ways: the implementers need to keep researchers in the loop after they have delivered the initial products. In essence, one becomes involved in what action research calls the action-reflection cycle (McNiff and Whitehead 2003). This cycle breaks down if some of the actors are missing. In South Africa, the institutions created for implementing bioregional programs such as CAPE have excluded the scientists who developed the conservation plans in the first place. This was a mistake. Strategies need constant updating, as reflection by scientists, stakeholders, and implementers identifies new and more effective ways of dealing with blockages and barriers to implementation. But the enabling bureaucrats aren't listening. Instead, they are locked into the rigid world of deadlines and tick boxes that constrain innovation. Progress suffers.

The responsibility for breaking this deadlock lies with both groups-scientists and implementers alike. In this regard, we can learn much from management science, where all sorts of wise words have been written on closing the "knowing-doing" gap (Pfeffer and Sutton 1999). Much of the solution lies in effective teamwork. The root causes of nature's plight-overpopulation and overconsumption-are complex problems which our predominantly biological backgrounds as conservation scientists do not equip us to tackle adequately. Obstacles notwithstanding (Campbell 2005), new "transdisciplines" (Max-Neef 2005) need to emerge from teamwork involving natural scientists, social scientist and scholars from the humanities (Penn 2003), as well as with the people who, by decree or democracy, make the decisions that can save or imperil nature. We need teams led by people with compassion and empathy (Goleman 1994). Dedicated and collaborative teamwork should not be intimidating. It is actually fascinating, productive and effective. Go on, try it.

Acknowledgements

I am deeply appreciative of the innumerable insights gained from my colleagues and friends, Andrew Balmford, Andrew Knight, Mandy Lombard, Mathieu Rouget, Jan Vlok and Trevor Wolf. Thank you! But most of all, to my dear wife Shirley Pierce, thanks so much for love, balance, and perspective.

Literature Cited

Balmford, A. 2003. Conservation planning in the real world: South Africa shows the way. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 18:435-438.

Campbell, L. 2005. Overcoming obstacles to interdisciplinary research. Conservation Biology 19:574-577.

Cowling, R.M. and R.L. Pressey. 2003. Introduction to systematic conservation planning in the Cape Floristic Region. Biological Conservation 122:1-13.

Driver, A., R.M. Cowling, and K. Maze. 2003. Planning for living landscapes: perspectives and lessons from South Africa. Center for Applied Biodiversity Science at Conservation International, Washington, D.C. and Botanical Society of South Africa, Cape Town.

Knight, A.T., R.M. Cowling, and B.M. Campbell. 2005. Planning for implementation: an operational model for implementing conservation action. Conservation Biology, in press.

Goleman, D. 1994. Emotional intelligence. Bantam, New York.

Max-Neef, M.A. 2005. Foundations of transdisciplinarity. Ecological Economics 53:5-16.

McNiff, J. and J. Whitehead. 2003. Action research: principles and practice. Routledge Falmer, London.

Penn, D.J. 2003. Evolutionary roots of our environmental problems: towards a Darwinian ecology. The Quarterly Review of Biology 78:275-301.

Pfeffer, J. and R.I. Sutton. 1999. Knowing "what" to do is not enough: turning knowledge into action. California Management Review 42(1):83-107.

Pierce, S.M., R.M. Cowling, A.T. Knight, A.T. Lombard, M. Rouget, and T. Wolf. 2005. Systematic conservation planning products for land-use planning: interpretation for implementation. Biological Conservation 125:441-458.

Richard Cowling received a 2005 Distinguished Service Award from the Society for Conservation Biology for his leadership of conservation planning and implementation programs that have set the global standard for participatory, systematic conservation and helped to establish a globally significant network of formal and informal conservation areas to maximize persistence and diversification of biodiversity in the face of global change.

Up to Table of Contents

Ahead to LOCAL CHAPTERS REPORT