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.

Young forest growing at Kara Kara is part of a Landcare and threatened-species recovery project. Photo: Greenfleet Australia CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0.

We are collecting information from Landcare groups and threatened-species recovery teams about activities their members have been involved in across Australia.

The information collected will be included with other publicly available data and analysed using a variety of statistical methods to identify:

• variables that can be used to assess and monitor the varied ecological, social and/or economic outcomes of those activities consistently across Australia at multiple scales
• trade-offs and synergies between the perceptions and objectives of people who work at different scales
• trade-offs and synergies between different types of program outcomes
• socioeconomic and institutional factors that contribute to different outcomes with changing climates, and in different contexts.

Insights from this work will generate information that National Landcare Network, threatened-species recovery teams and NRM Regions Australia can leverage to design programs and demonstrate their success at multiple scales.

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.