Products

Miradi: Adaptive Management Software for Conservation Projects

Miradi - a Swahili word meaning "project" or "goal" - is a user-friendly program that allows nature conservation practitioners to design, manage, monitor, and learn from their projects to more effectively meet their conservation goals. The program guides users through a series of step-by-step interview wizards, based on the Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation. As practitioners go through these steps, Miradi helps them to define their project scope, and design conceptual models and spatial maps of their project site. The software helps teams to prioritize threats, develop objectives and actions, and select monitoring indicators to assess the effectiveness of their strategies. Miradi also supports the development of workplans, budgets, and other tools to help practitioners implement and manage their project. Users can export Miradi project data to donor reports or, in the future, to a central database to share their information with other practitioners.

Go to www.miradi.org to learn more, or to download your own copy.

Auditing CMP Conservation Audits

To complement the Open Standards and to assess the extent to which they - or compatible organization-specific standards - are being followed, CMP member organizations have developed the practice of conservation auditing, ﾓa review of the planning, execution/ implementation, and if applicable, the results of a conservation project or program,ﾔ and have conducted nearly 40 such audits since 2003.  To learn more about these audits, we surveyed  more than 80 audits participants as well as conducted a thorough document review.  Our report synthesizes the findings of the audits with regard to the state of conservation practice, as well as lessons learned regarding the process and costs and benefits of conservation auditing.  The CMP will use these findings to identify priorities for improving the practice of conservation project design and adaptive management, to strengthen the conservation audit process, and to refine the Open Standards.

 [Audit Report]

Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation

A key question facing all conservation practitioners and organizations is: ﾓAre our actions effective in achieving our conservation goals?ﾔ It is imperative to answer this question in order to be able to adapt and change our actions over time, to learn about which actions work and do not work, and to convince our donors and society that conservation is a worthy investment.

The conservation community finds itself at a critical time in its evolution ﾖ a time when there is great convergence in thinking about how best to plan and implement conservation actions. Making the most of the extensive, trial-and-error experience gained by conservation organizations while designing, implementing and appraising their conservation projects, we have developed a set of project cycle or adaptive management open standards that are reflected in the work of all of our organizations and are, we believe, fundamental to conducting good conservation. These standards are less a recipe that must be followed exactly than a framework and guidance for conservation action.

All conservation efforts at any scale can be either explicitly or implicitly described as ﾓprojectsﾔ ﾖ a set of actions undertaken to achieve defined goals and objectives. All of the organizations involved in the Conservation Measures Partnership apply some form of project cycle management to their conservation projects. While there is some variation in the way this is carried out, there is also a great deal of consistency. We, the member organizations of CMP, agree that all projects should go through a robust conceptualization, planning, implementation, and monitoring process. And we agree that monitoring and evaluation (M&E) should be fully integrated into the project cycle. That said, the conservation community has yet to arrive at a common and complete understanding of the steps and principles of good project management.

Our goal in developing these open standards is to bring together common concepts, approaches, and terminology in conservation project design, management, and monitoring in order to help practitioners improve the practice of conservation. In particular, these standards are meant to provide the principles, tasks, and guidance necessary for the successful implementation of conservation projects. We have borrowed and adapted the term open standards from the information technology field to mean standards that are developed through public collaboration, freely available to anyone, and not the property of anyone or any organization and can thus be freely redistributed. What is important is not only the standards themselves, but also the means that participants follow to create and manage the standards. In the development of open standards, any interested party may contribute to their modification through participation in an industry-sanctioned governing body. For the conservation community, this means that these proposed standards are common property, constantly evolving and improving through the input of a wide variety of practitioners, and adaptable to individual organizationsﾒ needs.

As members of CMP, we hope that by developing these open standards, our colleagues in our respective organizations ﾖ and across the conservation landscape ﾖ will have clear guidance on how to maximize the effectiveness and efficiency of their projects for maximum conservation gain. In addition, we hope that these standards will serve to help us all know more clearly what is expected of us to achieve quality project management, thus providing a transparent basis for a consistent and standardized approach to external evaluation of our actions. Finally, we hope that these standards will promote and facilitate greater collaboration among conservation organizations ﾖ an essential ingredient if we are to be ultimately successful in achieving our goals.

[Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation, Also available in Spanish and French]

Rosetta Stone of Project Management Systems

For conservation practitioners to work together efficiently, they need to communicate effectively. Many conservation organizations have developed their own systems for planning, managing, and monitoring projects. In the process, they have also evolved their own language to describe these key concepts. Unfortunately, these various dialects have made it a challenge for practitioners to communicate both within and across institutions and disciplines, even though the concepts and processes may be similar.

The CMP Rosetta Stone presents side-by-side the various project management systems used by the conservation organizations in the Conservation Measures Partnership. It is our hope that this website will enable practitioners to translate from one system to another and also to learn from one another so that they can refine and improve their systems over time.

[Rosetta Stone of Project Management Systems]