Conservation Enterprise Planning Checklist
This checklist can be used by practitioners to help plan their conservation enterprise approach. The questions help to identify the important considerations in the context of a particular site. The first set of questions is related to understanding the theory of change for the conservation enterprise approach. The second set of questions focuses on building and improving the necessary enabling conditions focused on the establishment and sustainability of the enterprise itself. The third set of questions focuses on the necessary enabling conditions for assuring other outcomes along the theory of change. The last set of questions are for reflecting on how practitioners will know if the enterprise approach is achieving its purpose of biodiversity conservation. For more information and an example, watch the webinar Setting up for Success: Enabling Conditions for Conservation Enterprises.
Information relevant to Learning Questions:
Are enabling conditions in place to support a sustainable enterprise?
- Stakeholder alignment, diversification
- Market demand, profit potential, access to credit/capital
- Ownership, governance
- Government requirements, policies for enterprises, business alliances
- Financial management capacity, technical capacity
- Inputs, equipment, infrastructure
- Benefit sharing, targeted participants, combined strategic approaches, biodiversity linkage, policies for and enforcement of resource use, external disturbance
Does the enterprise lead to benefits to stakeholders?
- Increased income for participants
- Non-cash benefits
Do the benefits lead to positive changes in attitudes and behavior?
- Attitudes regarding sustainable use of resources
- Behaviors regarding sustainable use of resources
Does a change in stakeholders’ behaviors lead to a reduction to threats to biodiversity (or restoration)?
- Residential and commercial development
- Agriculture and aquaculture
- Energy production and mining
- Transportation and service corridors
- Biological resource use
- Human intrusions and disturbance
- Natural system modifications
- Invasive and other problematic species and genes
- Pollution
- Geological events
- Climate change and severe weather
Does a reduction in threats (or restoration) lead to conservation?
- Forest ecosystems
- Freshwater ecosystems
- Grassland ecosystems
- Marine ecosystems
- Species
Enterprise Types:
- Crops
- Livestock
- Sustainably-harvested timber products
- Non-timber forest products
- Sustainably harvested fish and shellfish
- Aquaculture and mariculture
- Marine/freshwater ecotourism
- Terrestrial ecotourism
- Other natural products
- Other businesses
