Understanding our impact Every single one of our conservation projects is different. Each one faces unique and complex challenges and aims to tackle threats that are often numerous, dynamic and interconnected. As such, each project will have a different goal and each will be working to drive changes that require a different timescale to achieve. FFI embraces these differences and we therefore ensure that the question of what success looks like is defined at the project level, with each project team developing their own Theory of Change (ToC). How success is measured is also rigorously defined by each project team. A Theory of Change is a logical model to describe what a project is doing and how activities will drive change within the projects own particular set of circumstances. Work is ongoing at an organisational level to ensure these models of change are as robust as they can be.
These help us understand what stage each project has reached on its own journey towards success, and how it is progressing towards its long-term biodiversity goals. The steps in these chains are deliberately broad; this allows us to aggregate similar projects into a single impact chain and thus understand our impact across the breadth of our portfolio. There is good evidence that projects which achieve change in the early steps of the chain are likely to progress onwards towards achieving their conservation goals4.
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Conservation Report 2021
In the impact chains presented throughout this report, the sites, species or projects represented are only counted once and are assigned the highest level of outcome or impact reported by the end of 2021. Looking across all of our projects and aggregating the results in this way allows us to understand the impact that we are having across our portfolio of work. In addition, we also work with our project teams to document the changes happening within each of our projects over the long term, and use this information to support adaptive management in projects. We have not included comparative data in this report, but you can learn more about how we assess the impact of our work at a project level in our document Understanding Conservation Success, which is available on our website.
4. Kapos, V., et al. (2009). Outcomes, not implementation, predict conservation success. Oryx, 43(3), 336-342. Kapos, V., et al. (2008). Calibrating conservation: new tools for measuring success. Conservation Letters 1.4 (2008): 155-164.
Ranger holding collar to tag elephant, Guinea. © Ruben Bañuelos Bons/FFI
To account for these differences, when creating this report we use impact chains:
We use the evidence of project outcomes provided by teams during the data gathering exercise to ascertain where each project is on its journey towards achieving impact, and map this onto the impact chain to give us an annual snapshot of our work across the organisation.
