Assessing the Management Performance of Biodiversity Conservation Initiatives and Investments: an Institutional Approach

Abstract

"An institutional analysis framework for assessing the management performance of biodiversity conservation investments and initiatives is developed in this chapter. While the focus is on biodiversity, the framework is also more widely applicable to problems involving the provision of public goods. This institutional approach is useful for a number of reasons. First, it uses capital assets to describe the state-of-the-world and specify the full spectrum of resource flows available to resource users. This allows analysts to frame the goals and objectives of various actors in terms of the attributes and characteristics of natural, manufactured, human, social and economic capital, and facilitate transparent discussions regarding sustainability. Second, this approach explicitly integrates the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework with the results-based management approach increasingly being used in the private and public sectors. The IAD framework provides a system for classifying rules and norms according to their function and to incorporate them into the action-activity-output-outcome-impact hierarchies used for results-based management. Third, the integrated institutional framework can be applied at different levels of analysis--political, policy implementation, and operational--in such a way that stimulates thoughtful policy design, analyses, and monitoring of biodiversity conservation investments and initiatives. Taking a multi-level perspective to policy design and implementation is necessary if we are to understand the dynamics of adaptive management, develop effective and efficient conservation investments and initiatives, and account for the full range of direct and indirect benefits of ecological research activities."