Strategic Planning for Species Conservation: A Handbook - IUCN

10. Integration of SCS with other conservation planning efforts
planning is often quite difficult, with highly complex problems leading to species threats,
multiple stakeholders with different value systems, and incomplete information on the
species and habitats of interest. Moreover, stakeholders often come from different cultures
with different collaboration styles – thereby adding to the difficulty in collectively moving a
group of people in a coherent way through a group process of information analysis and
decision-making. The PHVA workshop process specifically deals with these issues, and
uses the theoretical foundations of inter-organizational collaboration to generate an effective
species conservation strategy.
The PHVA process has distinct scientific and social goals. In the scientific context, the
workshop explicitly incorporates methods for PVA to assess the risks of threatened
population decline or extinction in the presence of destabilizing human activities. The
method of choice for conducting a PVA is computer simulation modelling, in which detailed
information on species demography (birth and death rates and their annual fluctuations
caused by environmental variability) and habitat ecology are used to create a reasonable
representation of the species or population of interest. This model can then be used to
make basic predictions of future population demographic behaviour in the presence of those
threats known to affect the species or thought to affect it (or them) in the future. The
models typically used in PVAs are stochastic, meaning that attempts are made to
incorporate the uncertainty, randomness, or unpredictability of life history and environmental
events into the modelling process.
From a sociological perspective, the PHVA workshop is designed to encourage creative
thinking and open communication among all participants – from the local village
representative to the internationally-recognised academic scientist or the federal
government official. As an outcome of this free flow of information and expression of ideas,
increased trust among stakeholder groups can emerge, which is advantageous since trust
is a critical precursor to effective consensus building.
This workshop environment of active participation encourages group ownership of the
information used in the analysis, which ultimately leads to a corresponding level of local
ownership of the proposed solutions. This local ownership greatly increases the likelihood
of successful implementation of recommendations that come from the workshop.
Because of its highly focused nature – usually concentrating on a single species or perhaps
only a subset of populations of a given species – the PHVA process is an excellent example
of the single-species end of the taxonomically-defined SCS process continuum. While
applicable in theory to a larger number of species, the highly structured facilitated workshop
process would be stretched beyond its limits if multiple species, each requiring its own
demographic risk analysis using PVA methodologies, were to be included in a single
planning process. When applied to a small number of related species, the PHVA process
incorporates nearly all elements of the SCS process described here. Specific emphasis on
the establishment of a meaningful Vision for species conservation receives little direct
attention in a PHVA, although such a Vision emerges secondarily through the identification
of the broad criteria that the workshop participants use to prioritize the Goals and Actions
that will lead to effective conservation activities. Recently, CBSG has employed more
explicit methods to facilitate the conduct of a Status Review in advance of the traditional
stakeholder-driven SCS-style workshop, thereby allowing adequate time to evaluate the
data and use them more effectively to derive effective Actions.
10.2.2 Range-wide Priority-Setting
RWPS is an expert-based, geographically-explicit planning method for widely distributed
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