Situational analysis

Situational analysis

Once you have evaluated the status of your conservation targets and identified critical threats you see the recurring and most serious threats at play across your system, it is time to drill further down into the “situation” at hand. It is through this process you gain a fuller understanding of what and who

is really driving those critical threats, what would motivate these conditions to change, and who your allies might be in your efforts to change the trajectory you have defined so far.A complete situation analysis involves assessing the key factors affecting your targets including direct threats, indirect threats and opportunities. Each factor can typically be linked to one or more stakeholders, those individuals, groups, or institutions that have an interest in or will be affected by your project's activities. Completing a situation analysis is a process that will help you and the other members of your project team work together to create a common understanding of your project's context - including the biological environment and the social, economic, political, and institutional systems that affect the biodiversity targets you want to conserve . it is one of the most important steps to consider. By understanding the biological and human context, you will have a better chance of developing appropriate objectives and designing strategic activities that will help you achieve them. The challenge here is to make your logic explicit without spending too much time on trying to develop a perfect model of reality. In many ways, it is the process of discussing the situation with your project team that is more important than the product that results to capture this discussion. Without a clear understanding of what is happening at your project area, it is nearly impossible to develop objectives and strategic activities that make sense for your project area's conditions. In addition, often project team members may think they have a shared understanding of their project's context and what the main threats and opportunities are. In going through a formal process to document underlying assumptions about the project's context, however, project teams often find they have somewhat different perceptions of the same situation. For example, biologists tend to focus on the biological aspects of the project area whereas development organizations tend to focus on the socioeconomic factors. Completing your situation analysis helps all project team members come to a common understanding of your project area's context, its critical threats and the underlying factors you should be considering in your project planning. The basic elements of a situation analysis are shown in the diagram below and defined as follows. As you can see, through identifying targets and critical threats in Step 2: Define Scope & Targets, Step 3: Assess Viability and Step 4: Identify Critical Threats, you already have a good start on your situation analysis.

To achieve conservation we ultimately have to abate critical threats and restore degraded targets. To do so effectively, we must understand the factors that drive these problems and also identify promising conditions that may lead to solutions. This means understanding the biological, political, economic, and socio-cultural context within which our targets exist -in particular, the indirect threats causing each critical threat or degraded target and the opportunities upon which to build. For example, for a direct threat of over fishing, an indirect threat might be community need for food and an opportunity might be community interest in setting up sustainable fisheries management. The intention is to make explicit your assumptions as to what specific factors are contributing to each critical threat and degraded target so as to provide insights and prompt discovery of effective points of entry and courses of action.