Biodiversity conservation: Applying new criteria to assess excellence

Biodiversity conservation is a discipline that has developed from amateur pursuits by wildlife enthusiasts in the 1960s to today's complex community of multi-national NGOs, government agencies and research institutions. The conservation sector is largely funded by government grants, private donations and sponsorship, and unsurprisingly faces increasing scrutiny in the current economic downturn. Furthermore, the observed failure to halt the decline of biodiversity provides additional pressure to organisations. In this context, business excellence models which have been utilised across many other sectors for evaluation, benchmarking and improvement planning could prove valuable in influencing the effectiveness of conservation management. This paper presents a sector-specific Conservation Excellence Model which describes how conservation managers can better understand how scientific processes and results can be aligned with financial and organisational measures of success. The relevance of the model is illustrated through evaluation of two well-documented species conservation programmes, and experience of adapting the assessment process to evaluate a field-based conservation programme is also presented. The potential benefits of using the Conservation Excellence Model include improved objective setting, more effective measures of biological success and clearer evaluation of conservation processes. The paper illustrates how assessment models can support improvement in organisations still unfamiliar with concepts of excellence.