What does success look like? Factors resulting in positive outcomes for Landcare and threatened-species recovery-team projects

Project start date: 01/04/2024
Project end date: 31/12/2026
NESP funding: $258,000 (GST-exclusive)

Community-based natural resource management groups are the foundation of restoration and conservation action across Australia.

More than 30 years of research has generated a wealth of information about factors that contribute to, or detract from, the success of community-based natural resource management (NRM) programs. There are numerous confounding and interacting elements that determine the ecological, social and/or economic outcomes of NRM activities, making it difficult to identify key factors and compare outcomes.

A woman and child plant tube stock as part of a revegetation project (Image: Janelle / AdobeStock)

Key research areas

To identify the factors resulting in positive outcomes for Landcare and threatened-species recovery-team programs, this project is:

• synthesising insights from previous research about factors that contribute to the ecological, social and/or economic outcomes of community based NRM projects
• developing a conceptual model for success to guide data collection and analysis
• incorporating newly collected data within an existing database to create 2 national-scale databases of NMR activities
• assessing the extent to which survey respondents’ perceived indicators of an activity’s outcomes (successes) correlate with observable indicators that are in the existing, publicly available database.