There has been increasing demand from New Zealand Department of Conservation (DOC) staff and people working with DOC for guidance on how to evaluate Conservation with Communities projects (CCPs), to ensure they are working towards DOC’s goal that ‘people are aware of, understand and make valued contributions to conservation’. CCPs are activities or programmes that aim to encourage, support and build the capability of communities and individuals to contribute to conservation. This guide introduces a six-step methodology for designing a project or programme evaluation. It includes a series of templates that can be used for designing an evaluation. A fictional scenario is also provided to illustrate how to use the templates. The guide aids the incorporation of evaluation into project planning; the use of evaluation to ‘learn as we go’ and to decide on future action; and community participation in evaluation. At the end of the guide there is a toolkit, which includes the templates, examples of data collection tools and indicators, and other supporting information. Training on these guidelines has been piloted in two conservancies. This guide has been designed to be used with existing departmental resources on CCPs. Effective evaluation of CCPs will enable DOC to ensure that current and future projects are carefully targeted to meet the needs of DOC and the community, and to make good use of the resources available.
Purpose
This resource has been developed to assist Department of Conservation (DOC) staff and other individuals working with DOC on CCPs to evaluate their projects. These projects will often be referred to as ‘programmes’ in this guide, in recognition of the fact that they generally involve a collection of different types of activities that are implemented at different times, for different purposes and using different methods.