What is it about?
This paper discusses the need for effective conservation capacity building in response to increasing global environmental challenges. It highlights that individuals, organizations, and communities require the skills and knowledge to address environmental issues in various contexts. The current capacity-building efforts are often ad hoc and reactive, leading to duplication and inefficient resource use. The paper emphasizes the lack of a coordinated approach to capacity building at the national or international level and calls for future assessments to identify global capacity needs. The study focuses on Kenya and presents an approach to gather information about current capacity-building initiatives, revealing a significant role of academic institutions and international NGOs. It also discusses the gender bias in participant demographics and suggests the need for standardized methods and quality evaluation in capacity-building programs. The paper proposes using GIS for spatial analysis and emphasizes the importance of collaborative partnerships for capacity building in conservation, with a focus on lower and middle-income countries facing biodiversity threats.
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Why is it important?
This paper is essential as it sheds light on the challenges and opportunities in conservation capacity building, offers practical methods for data collection and analysis, and calls for more strategic and coordinated efforts to ensure that conservation initiatives are better equipped to tackle the pressing environmental issues of our time. So much money is invested in conservation around the world, but little of it takes account of the capacity to make good use of this support.
Perspectives
This was a great paper to write because it was a combined effort of and two ecologists, a quantitative analyst and myself and we were trying to answer the question of how to develop a method of swiftly assessing national conservation capacity in countries around the world to be useful for the large organisations that invest in tackling conservation, but in many countries where this information is not available.
Professor Kenneth Lynch
University of Gloucestershire
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Assessing national-level provision of conservation capacity building: lessons learnt from a case study of Kenya, Oryx, June 2022, Cambridge University Press,
DOI: 10.1017/s0030605322000345.
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