by Liza Higgins-Zogib, WWF International and Kathy MacKinnon, The World Bank
Mongolia RAPPAM assessment, 2005 © Alexander Belokurov
The World Bank/WWF Alliance Tracking Tool is based on the IUCN management effectiveness Framework. It was developed to monitor effectiveness in individual protected areas as a means of assessing progress towards the Alliance target of 75 million hectares of more effectively managed forest protected areas; but it is now being used in a range of terrestrial habitats and has been adapted for use in marine protected areas.74 The scorecard includes all six components of management identified in the Framework (context, planning, inputs, process, outputs and outcomes), but has an emphasis on context, planning, inputs and processes. Although basic and simple to use, the scorecard provides an effective mechanism for monitoring progress towards more effective management over time and enables park managers and donors to identify additional needs, constraints and next steps in improving effectiveness of protected area management. The tracking tool is being used by the World Bank, WWF and the GEF as a monitoring tool for areas in which they are involved, and has been adapted for more specific uses around the world.
The World Bank/WWF Alliance for Forest Conservation and Sustainable Use (‘the Alliance’) was formed in April 1998, in response to the continued depletion of the world's forest biodiversity and of forest-based goods and services essential for sustainable development. As part of its programme of work the Alliance set an initial target relating to the management effectiveness of protected areas of: 50 million hectares of existing but highly threatened forest protected areas to be secured under effective management by the year 2005.75 This target was revised in 2005 to: bringing 75 million hectares of existing forest protected areas under improved management to achieve conservation and development outcomes by 2010. To evaluate progress towards this target the Alliance developed a simple site-level Tracking Tool to facilitate reporting on management effectiveness of protected areas within WWF and World Bank projects. The Tracking Tool has been built around the application of the WCPA Framework and Appendix II of the first edition of the Framework document has provided its basic structure. After being tested and modified over a three year period, the Tracking Tool has been operational since 2003, and is being systematically and periodically used in all forest protected area projects supported by WWF and the Alliance.76
Figure 14. The Tracking Tool use worldwide: The Tracking Tool has been used in 37 countries: Africa (28 forest protected areas), Asia (65), Europe (74), Latin America (39)
Although the Tracking Tool has been developed to track and monitor progress towards the Alliance target, it can also be used more generally to help monitor progress towards improving management effectiveness. The tool's objectives are that it should be:
Capable of providing a harmonized reporting system for protected area assessment;
Suitable for replication;
Able to supply consistent data to allow tracking of progress over time;
Relatively quick and easy to complete by protected area staff, and thus not reliant on high levels of funding or other resources;
Easily understood by non-specialists;
Nested within existing reporting systems to avoid duplication of effort.
The Tracking Tool provides a composite measurement across 30 parameters, integrating all six components of management (context, planning, inputs, process, outputs and outcomes) and is designed around a system that provides four alternative text answers to each question and a datasheet that provides important contextual information. The four answers have an associated score to summarise progress and data fields to record notes about the answers and steps to be taken to improve the management issue if necessary (see below).
Although all six elements of the Framework are included, most of the questions relate to issues of planning, inputs and process. The Tracking Tool is thus too limited to allow a detailed evaluation of outcomes. Clearly though, however good management is, if biodiversity continues to decline, the protected area objectives are not being met. Therefore the question on condition assessment has disproportionate importance in the overall Tracking Tool. This means that overall scores obtained from the tool should be treated with caution as the scoring system is not weighted, and clearly some questions are more crucial to the effectiveness of the park than others. The tool does however allow for progress to be measured over specific management issues, for example monitoring activities or the level of community involvement.
The basis of the Tracking Tool is thus simplicity and low cost. But a minimum complexity is needed for the tool to be effectively used. Ideally, the questionnaire should be completed as part of a discussion between, for instance, the project officer/task manager, the protected area manager and a representative of local stakeholders. A useful part of the questionnaire for the purpose of project oversight and management improvement is the section on “comments” and ‘agreed next steps’.
The objectives of the Tracking Tool, to be quick and simple, also mean it has limitations as to what it can achieve. It should not, for example, be regarded as an independent assessment, or as the sole basis for adaptive management, and should certainly not replace more thorough methods of assessment for the purposes of adaptive management. In spite of these limitations, the Tracking Tool has proven to be a useful instrument to build a baseline on management effectiveness, for tracking progress overtime, for providing critical information about portfolio-wide issues that need to be addressed as a priority, and for putting in place a simple monitoring system in sites that will not afford to develop a more detailed monitoring system in years to come.
Table 13. Example of some of the Tracking Tool's questions and answers
Mongolia RAPPAM assessment, 2005 © Alexander Belokurov
The Tracking Tool has been used to survey the effectiveness of the WWF portfolio of 206 forest protected areas, in 37 countries in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America, initially in 2003/4 and then repeated during 2005/6. The World Bank has time series data for project sites in several countries, including Bolivia, India, Philippines, Indonesia and the Central Asian republics. The Global Environment Facility (GEF) has adopted the Tracking Tool as a simple impact monitoring indicator, and recently China and India have adopted the tool as part of their national protected area monitoring systems. To aid adoption the tool has been translated into many languages.
The results of the WWF survey of 2003/4 were analysed in a global survey, at the time the widest sampling of countries undertaking protected area management effectiveness using a consistent methodology.77 Some key findings include:
In general, issues relating to legal establishment, biodiversity condition assessment, boundary demarcation, design and objective setting seem to be satisfactorily addressed in the protected areas sampled, while activities relating to people (both local communities and visitors) are less effective, as are management planning, monitoring and evaluation, budget and education and awareness.
Staff numbers correlate well with good biodiversity condition and with overall management effectiveness. Adequacy of training is patchy and many protected areas with low staffing levels also reported that staff faced serious shortfalls in training and capacity building. There are dramatic differences in average staff numbers in different parts of the world, with Latin America generally having far lower staffing levels.
There seems to be a very good correlation between the success of a protected area in education and awareness-raising and its overall effectiveness, with the highest correlation coefficient out of all those tested. This is highly significant in terms of future interventions because education was one of the issues in which many parks scored lowest.
The analysis suggests that good monitoring and evaluation system are also closely correlated to those protected areas where biodiversity is best being conserved. Unfortunately, few protected areas reported having comprehensive monitoring and evaluation programmes.
Protected areas face a series of critical threats. The most severe threats to forest protected areas identified spontaneously by respondents were poaching (identified in a third of protected areas), encroachment and logging (mainly illegal, but also legal logging), with collection of non-timber forest products also being a common problem. These four were considered to be key threats in more protected areas than all other problems added together.
Law enforcement and surveillance was by far the most important management activity identified, listed by over a third of all sites, followed by working with regional authorities and with local communities, management planning, building institutional and governance capacity and ecotourism. Enforcement also shows one of the strongest relationships to management effectiveness.
Mongolia RAPPAM assessment, 2005 © Alexander Belokurov
As well as indicating trends on the status of the WWF portfolio, the analysis looked at the effectiveness of the Tracking Tool as a methodology. The analysis assessed the extent to which the effectiveness of individual management actions correlated with other actions. Analysis of correlation coefficients suggested a high degree of matching between elements. Overall staff numbers are most highly correlated with the largest number of other items, followed by resource management, provision of equipment and education and awareness. Other important elements included monitoring and evaluation, personnel management and visitor facilities.
The analysis also assessed the significance of the overall score. As noted above, WWF and the World Bank have been extremely cautious about the use of the overall “score” generated by filling in the various questions in the Tracking Tool. There were several reasons for this:
Concern that the assessment be seen by protected area staff as a judgement rather than a management tool.
Recognition of the difficulty in comparing between protected areas when reporting is done by different people (who may have very different attitudes to and responses toward self assessment for instance).
Caution about the accuracy of the tracking tool as anything more than a quick assessment of strengths and weaknesses.
However, the analysis found that most individual questions correlate fairly highly with the total score, the exceptions being those relating to legal status, protected area design, local communities and Indigenous people.78 This suggests that the total score apparently correlates reasonably well with most individual scores and thus can serve as a reasonably good indicator of overall management effectiveness.
The adoption of the Tracking Tool by the GEF, World Bank and WWF, three of the largest international donors for protected areas and biodiversity in developing countries, means that there is now a simple global monitoring system in place for management effectiveness. This simple scorecard is also likely to prove a popular tool for reaching the CBD target of 30 per cent of all protected areas to be assessed for protected area management effectiveness, especially in countries where technical and financial resources are limited.
78These conclusions result from a Cronbach Coefficient Alpha analysis.