Hornbill 2 (1998) pp 106-114

In-service training and adaptive management methods

Michael E Meredith

Summary

Learning from experience

There are many ways of learning apart from formal training courses: informal discussion with other people, including people who have contributed papers to Hornbill; reading in journals and reference books; attending conferences and workshops; and of course from analysing our own experience.

Learning from experience is vital for protected area management, because no single 'recipe' exists. Every situation is different and management must be based on a history of what works and what does not work in that particular protected area.

Analysis of experience plays another special role: it indicates what we need to learn in order to work better. Once those needs are identified, they form the basis for planning and implementing a training programme. And if training addresses specific needs which have already been identified, it is more likely that it will result in people changing to new and better ways of working.

Each of us can reflect on what we have done and how it has worked out in practice. But we also need to do that as an organisation. The key to organisational learning from experience is a management system designed to analyse experience.

The management cycle

Fig 1: The management cycle

Management is often summed up as "analysis, planning, implementation and control" (eg Kotler 1991) (fig 1). A typical management plan for a national park will begin with a section describing the area and its natural resources (analysis), then strategic and tactical plans (planning) (eg Anderson et al 1982, Watling and Mulyana 1981, Meredith 1993). The plan will of course be implemented, and there will be procedures for checking on implementation, usually in the form of annual reports (control).

In the past, the 'control' mechanisms were often designed merely to check that the planned activities were carried out. Sometimes they were expanded to provide some information for a new analysis phase, in which case we might use the term 'monitoring'. When monitoring provides feedback in this way, we have a complete 'management cycle'.

In Park management, a new management plan should be based on the information produced by monitoring the current plan, so that the new plan is based on more information, with a sounder basis in experience than its predecessor, and should be easier to write. The management cycle is designed to help us to move forward more easily and more rapidly than we could without it. Over time, individuals and organisations learn from past experience and improve their performance. Good monitoring and feedback are the key to steady progress and improved performance for both organisations and individuals.

Problems with monitoring

In practice, the management cycle rarely works as efficiently as it should in theory. When new plans have to be made, planners do not always look for monitoring information; when they do, it is often not available or not particularly useful. There are several reasons why monitoring has been badly done or not done at all.

First, monitoring was generally not planned and implemented until an activity was finished. Those responsible for monitoring were not the same people involved in preparing or implementing the original management plan. When they set about monitoring, it was not clear what they were supposed to measure: the objectives are usually unmeasurable, often vague. Moreover, assessment often depended on a change or improvement, but no information was available on the situation before the activity was carried out. Change cannot be measured without baseline information. Monitoring needs to be planned in advance, before implementation, and probably should be an integral part of the management plan.

Second, monitoring does not get enough time and other resources. Resources are always limited, and the demands for resources for management activities often take priority over monitoring the results. In the short term, this always seems reasonable. But in the end we do not know if our time and money are well-spent or wasted, and we have no information to help us decide if we should continue with the activity, improve on it, or scrap it and find another way to achieve our objectives.

The third problem with monitoring may be the biggest and the most difficult to solve. Often the people involved do not really want to know, simply because they are afraid that monitoring may show that the results of their work are not very good. There is always a risk that a close look will show that objectives have not been met, or at least that little has been achieved for the effort and money put in. It is much more comforting to report that we have worked very hard to achieve worthy objectives, rather than reporting on how successful we have been. There are good reasons for this, quite apart from personal feelings: reporting any result which falls short of total success might make it more difficult to get funding or staff or promotion. The present system itself discourages honest assessment.

Poor monitoring is obviously a handicap when we set about planning the next stage of protected area management; in the absence of information, we must often continue with some activities and methods which are not successful. But inadequate monitoring also has serious consequences for conservation at a global level. Suppose we want to know if, say, integrated conservation and development (ICAD) is a good way to approach park management: we look in the literature and find lots of reports of 'good' ICAD in national parks. Before concluding that it is outstandingly successful, we need to remember that people will always put a positive 'spin' on their project reports, and if it goes really wrong, they won't write it up at all. An independent report for the World Bank (Wells et al 1992) looked at 23 ICAD projects and concluded that they had resulted in numerous benefits for local people, but that "it is questionable whether many of the project activities have generated local benefits that have reduced pressures on the parks or reserves they are trying to protect - the key objective of ICDPs". By skimping the monitoring, we all carry on doing the same things in the same way, even if success is limited; so we miss the opportunity to learn new and better ways.

A better approach to monitoring

As the problems with monitoring have emerged, people have devised a range of new approaches. In the private sector, monitoring has been formalised as Management By Objectives (MBO) (Schumacher 1973, Drucker 1964); similarly the German development community uses a formal Objective Oriented Project Planning (ZOPP) methodology (GTZ 1990). Some approaches try to make all the assumptions behind planning explicit, so that monitoring focuses on assumption-testing rather than fault-finding; the Logical Framework ("logframe") methodology adopted by many UN bodies is an example.

In the field of ecosystem management, Adaptive Management has been adopted by many government natural resource management agencies, particularly in the USA. As described by Meffe and Carroll (1997, p 373), adaptive management is "characterized by a program of continual monitoring of indicators which measure progress toward goals, ongoing analyses of policy alternatives, and an institutional capacity to change management practices when better alternatives are available and current practices are not achieving their objectives." In this approach, every activity or decision on land management is treated as an experiment to test hypotheses, with conclusions based on measurement of specific parameters. Local managers have the power to change detailed management practices in the light of these results, within a broad framework set by top management.

Fig 2: The project cycle (from Margoluis and Salafsky 1998)

The Biodiversity Support Program (BSP) has worked on adapting these approaches for protected area management. BSP is a consortium of international conservation agencies and is funded by USAID. Their methodology was piloted in the Asia-Pacific region; WCS was involved with trials in Papua New Guinea and we have recently introduced it in our project in Laos. The results of all this work have just appeared in a book entitled "Measures of Success" (Margoluis & Salafsky 1998).

Fig 2 gives an overview of the Measures of Success (MoS) process. As indicated at the bottom of the diagram, it is an iterative process, with each cycle providing the starting point for the next. There is also a good deal of integration between the various steps, so that working on one step may suggest ideas and improvements for the previous step. Step C 'Develop Monitoring Plan' is the focal point for our purposes here: you will see that monitoring is planned before the management plan is implemented. A feature of MoS is that the management plan (Step B) is based on clearly stated and measurable objectives, which also form the starting point of the monitoring plan.

The steps relevant to monitoring are shown in detail in Fig 3. The monitoring plan sets out to gather information on various indicators, each of which is related to specific objectives or activities. Information gathered is clearly linked to management decisions about the activities carried out and the extent to which objectives are being met. Monitoring pinpoints problems, related to implementation and to the assumptions underlying management decisions, which are made explicit in the Conceptual Model.

In the MoS process, the monitoring and management plans are implemented in parallel (fig 2 Step D). Collecting information and reviewing implementation are on-going processes, so that activities can be adjusted immediately and made more effective during the period of the plan; it is not necessary to wait until the end of the planning period to make changes. This approach to monitoring should be less threatening to managers, as it aims to provide ongoing 'tutors' comments', not just to be a 'final examination' which some pass and others fail.

Developing a Monitoring Plan Mission: purpose, strategy, [values] Conceptual Model:subject, direct factors (priority threats), indirect factors, activities Goal: general, brief, measurable Objectives: SMART = Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-limited Activities: Linked, Focused, Feasible, Appropriate Information needs Indicators: Measurable, Precise, Consistent, Sensitive Methods: Accurate and reliable, Cost-effective, Feasible, Appropriate Tasks: what? when? who? where?

Fig 3: Steps for developing a monitoring plan

The main thrust of the MoS approach is to integrate monitoring into management, which means that management itself must be based on measurable objectives and goals. This enables the management cycle to work as it should in theory, it provides feedback on what additional knowledge or skills are required, and thus forms the framework for a training programme.

The following sections suggest ways of integrating management and monitoring plans within NPWD.

A Monitoring Plan for Wildlife in Sarawak

The State already has a Master Plan for Wildlife. The discussion so far indicates that we need a State-level Monitoring Plan to complement it. We also need to begin monitoring what we're doing at protected area level, even for protected areas which do not yet have a formal management plan.

At State level, the ultimate test for the Master Plan is whether or not wildlife populations begin to increase. The same measure is obviously also applicable to protected areas. So we need to gather information on the trends in wildlife populations over time. This, however, is a very insensitive measure of success, for several reasons - because many species breed slowly and will only recover slowly, because our measures are not very precise, and because natural fluctuations also affect populations from year to year. We need this as a long-term measure, but we need medium and short-term measures too.

Medium term measures can be based on the threats to wildlife. Our activities such as the trade ban on wild meat, establishing protected areas, or involving local people in management, are designed to reduce or remove the threats to wildlife. We should measure how successful have we been, then, in reducing threats, whether that means hunting, encroachment, over-fishing, visitor disturbance, or whatever are the main threats at State level or in a particular TPA.

Checking on implementation of our action plans provides a short term measure: have we done what we planned to do, whether that is clearing and marking the Park boundary or training forty town enforcement officers. Again the emphasis is on finding out what are the obstacles to implementation and modifying the plan accordingly.

Next steps

Remember that we want to integrate monitoring into management. The indicators - the specific parameters which we're going to measure - must be related to detailed, measurable objectives. So the next step is to clarify goals and objectives, and the indicators which we want to monitor, for wildlife management at State level. Then we need to discuss what goals and objectives we need to set for each protected area, so that they contribute to the State-level objectives. At this stage, we will be able to define techniques to measure our parameters and to decide on the training needed by staff to take these measures.

Only then will we be able to run training courses where people learn new ideas and new skills and use them to improve the effectiveness of their everyday work.

References