Assessing Collaborative Conservation: A Case Survey of Output, Outcome, and Impact Measures Used in the Empirical Literature

Much existing research on collaborative conservation has focused on
process, even as researchers have called for greater attention to
explaining what results these processes yield. It is time to take stock
of collaborative conservation research by mapping what kinds of variables
researchers are including in analyses. Here we conduct a case
survey from the SCAPE database of environmental decision-making
cases. We include cases involving collaboration across government,
environmental protection, and resource exploitation interests in
western democratic countries. Results reveal patterns in what
researchers include in their outputs, outcomes, and impacts measures
of collaborative conservation. While there is little difference by
publication type (peer-reviewed journals, scholarly book chapters, or
gray literature) or over time, we find significant differences in explicit
measures across variable types. In particular, variables more proximate
to process in a logic chain are more often measured, as are
social rather than ecological variables.