This three-year project was funded in March 2008 by the CGIAR-Canada Linkage Fund, established by the Canadian International Development Agency to strengthen collaboration between the International Agricultural Research Centers of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and researchers at Canadian universities. The project builds on the skills and experience of the two research partners, the Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and the Centre for Non-Timber Resources (CNTR), to improve the way that government and non-government conservation and development agencies assess the impacts of their work.

Important changes have taken place in the way conservation and development programmes and projects are done, but there is an urgent need for better ways to monitor and evaluate their impacts. The shortfall in effective evaluation has happened for many reasons, but one of the most important reasons is simply the lack of good available methods for impact assessment. In many cases the proposed methods are “top-down” and consume vast resources of the implementing agencies. In addition, livelihoods outcomes have been notoriously difficult to measure. For example, the current approaches often have limited ability to answer, or even to ask, questions about where the balance between conservation and development should lie. Hence, there is a great need for a reliable and cost-effective method to estimate current status and conservation and development outcomes. Methods are needed to make the tradeoffs between conservation and development explicit, and to provide platforms for negotiating these tradeoffs.

This project aims to improve the environmental and livelihood impacts of conservation and development programmes and projects in forested landscapes by synthesizing current theory and experience with monitoring and evaluation of outcomes and by developing appropriate tools and methods for assessing impact. Working in collaboration with conservation organizations in Lao PDR and Cameroon, through CIFOR projects already underway, and with a CNTR project in Northern Manitoba and Northern BC, the project will also field-test a best-practice approach. It will develop lessons from experiences to date and produce clear guidelines for different kinds of monitoring and evaluation. It is intended that this research will facilitate new ways of conceptualizing projects and it will lead to improved project implementation and to more systematic and effective learning from experience.