Let’s be honest, most of us have at some point been involved in a conservation effort that did not go as planned or where the activities implemented simply didn’t lead to the outcomes we were expecting. If you are interested in turning that experience into something positive, we are interested in hearing from you! We often talk about the importance of learning from things that don’t go to plan, but finding well documented examples of this in conservation can be challenging. The Cambridge Conservation Initiative Embracing Failures Project is a collaborative effort to improve the way that conservation practitioners record, discuss and ultimately learn from failure. Why should I participate?While PANORAMA is focused on documenting and communicating success, it is increasingly recognised that learning from failure often plays a key role in achieving eventual success and that an inability to learn from failure can be one of the key barriers that prevent success from being achieved. Many of you have submitted solutions on the PANORAMA web platform – perhaps the journey to these solutions involved failure and an adaptive approach? Or you have worked on other initiatives that would not qualify as solutions, but still hold valuable lessons? By participating in this project, your input from these and other, similar experiences will help develop methods and tools to help conservation practitioners better record, discuss and learn from failure. Participating may also help your own thinking around how to maximise learning from conservation efforts that did not go entirely to plan. How can I participate?The project has developed a taxonomy of root causes of failure in conservation. This taxonomy is designed to be used as a tool for identifying, recording and discussing failure in a constructive way, where the primary focus is on learning, rather than apportioning blame. To test this taxonomy we are looking for conservation practitioners who have been involved in a conservation effort that they consider to have “failed” in some way. Relevant examples could include: cases of conservation work that did not meet some or all of their objectives, cases that met their short-term objectives but failed to provide the intended long-term impacts, cases where the intended long-term impacts were met but the intervention did not contribute significantly to achieving these or cases that failed initially but succeeded later on (in these cases we are interested in the reasons for the initial failure). If you have a relevant example, please click on this link, review the root causes of failure in the taxonomy, check ALL the root causes of failure that apply to your example and let us know if anything is missing, unclear or obsolete. The form is completely anonymous and should take around 5 minutes to complete. We would like to have all entries completed by March 31st 2020. ANONYMITY DISCLAIMERAll information used in this project is subject to strict anonymity protocols and at no point will we ask for or share any information that could be used to identify specific individuals, locations, projects or organisations. Additional linksFull draft taxonomy
More information on the projects anonymity protocols can be found here.
If you have any questions please contact Iain Dickson at Birdlife.
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