Individual and community empowerment improve resource users' perceptions of community-based conservation effectiveness in Kenya and Tanzania.

Community-based conservation has been increasingly recognized as critical to achieve both conservation and socio-economic development goals worldwide. However, the long-term sustainability of community-based conservation programs is dependent on a broadly shared perception among community members that management actions are achieving their stated goals. Thus, understanding the underlying factors driving differences in perceptions of management effectiveness can help managers prioritize the processes and outcomes most valued by resource users and thereby promote sustained support for conservation efforts.

Introducing Elinor for monitoring the governance and management of area-based conservation.

Monitoring the governance and management effectiveness of area-based conservation has long been recognized as an important foundation for achieving national and global biodiversity goals and enabling adaptive management. However, there are still many barriers that prevent conservation actors, including those affected by governance and management systems from implementing conservation activities and programs and from gathering and using data on governance and management to inform decision-making across spatial scales and through time. We explored current and past efforts to assess governance and management effectiveness and barriers actors face in using the resulting data and insights to inform conservation decision-making.