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Global Conservation Program (GCP) Learning Initiatives

Although every conservation site presents its own particular biological, political, and socio-economic concerns,

Many conservation organizations around the world face similar challenges. The GCP supports learning across its partner organizations, and sharing lessons learned with the wider conservation community in order to promote effective conservation practices and generate new conservation knowledge and approaches.

many of the GCP partners (as well as other conservationists around the world) face remarkably similar challenges. How do we define and monitor progress? What is the most effective way to move from site-level work to achieving conservation impact at larger scales? What new tools are needed to succeed at landscape- and seascape-level scales? To address these challenges, the GCP supports cross-institutional learning among its six partners so that they can learn from each other and share those lessons with the broader conservation community. In this way, the GCP aims to be more than merely the sum of its parts.

To achieve this, GCP partners work together to conduct applied research and dialogue on topics of broad conservation interest. This collaborative learning initiative aims to identify and share effective conservation practices and generate new conservation knowledge and approaches. This type of inter-institutional learning embodies the larger GCP objective of developing and promoting cutting-edge approaches that target global conservation priorities, and of advancing the state of conservation science and its application.

GCP partners decide what learning initiatives they will focus on. To help guide this decision, they have developed a set of criteria. Learning initiatives should:

• Be collaborative. All activities must demonstrate the potential for learning to benefit at least two GCP partner organizations and must have a high likelihood of being incorporated across the larger conservation community.
• Demonstrate commitment by partners. A tangible commitment by participating partners to the proposed learning activity, including providing resources in addition to GCP funding, is required.
• Be results-oriented and demand-driven. There should be a clear and practical conservation application that is not solely academic.
• Be well designed. Activities should be well planned and clearly articulated, incorporating principles of sound project management.
• Document and communicate learning results effectively. Each learning activity should document the results of learning in ways that enable and facilitate communication, sharing, and application by others.
• Promote a culture of cross-organizational learning. Activities should promote learning at multiple levels and across organizations.
• Be innovative. Learning should fill gaps in existing knowledge and provide a basis for adaptive management.

GCP learning initiatives include:

Tropical Marine Protected Area Networks: GCP partners are working together to generate new knowledge about how to design, adaptively manage, monitor, and finance ecologically and socially coherent networks of marine protected areas.

Integrating Socio-Economics into Landscape-Scale Conservation: To better understand how to integrate human behavior into large-scale conservation planning, GCP partners are developing a framework to conduct social and economic analysis, as well as appropriate tools and methodologies based on their collective experience.

Hydrological Processes: Effective conservation at the landscape scale depends on the maintenance of critical ecological processes. GCP partners will collaborate to develop, test, and refine methodologies to integrate hydrological processes into landscape-scale planning.

Landscape-Scale Conservation Planning: Conservation organizations are increasingly working at large landscape scales, and developing new planning methodologies such as conservation target selection to support their efforts. GCP partners are assessing the differences and similarities across each organization's approach to improve the practice of conservation.

Conservation Measures Partnership: The GCP was instrumental in initiating the Conservation Measures Partnership, which explores how to monitor and measure conservation success, and which develops shared standards for the practice of conservation.

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