Excerpt from “The OAP-approach: the quest for impact at scale”

Read the full blog on our partner’s page: MAVA Foundation Blog
The FOS Europe Team (2018), (from left to right) Vladimir Milushev, Nico Boenisch, Daniela Aschenbrenner and Ilke Tilders
The FOS Europe Team (2018), (from left to right) Vladimir Milushev, Nico Boenisch, Daniela Aschenbrenner and Ilke Tilders

For us at FOS Europe, it has been a wonderful and enriching experience to be part of this transformation process. Our role is to provide support in the realm of adaptive management, using the CMP Open Standards. We work hard to build the capacity, processes and tools needed by partners to adaptively plan, measure, and improve their OAPs, making them more responsive to contextual changes and more effective in their response. One of the core challenges in this process has been to get discussions focused on that nasty question that keeps us awake at night; the question of impact. A nasty question indeed,  because achieving real change is often hard and painfully slow (see also Julien Semelin’s blog: The question of our impact in 2022). Given that the conservation work is top urgent, we can’t afford to not discuss the effectiveness of our work. We have to understand whether, for example, our awareness-raising campaign is leading to behavioural change. Or if the research in which we have invested is actually leading to better management, changing the way in which natural resources are used. What if we are wrong? What if the change is not happening?

Continue reading: MAVA Foundation Blog


By Ilke Tilders,  FOS EuropeIlke@fosonline.org