About CMP

The Conservation Measures Partnership (CMP) is a joint venture of conservation NGOs and other collaborators that are committed to improving the practice of conservation. Core members include the African Wildlife Foundation, The Nature Conservancy, Wildlife Conservation Society, and World Wide Fund for Nature/World Wildlife Fund. Collaborators include The Cambridge Conservation Forum, Conservation International, Enterprise Works Worldwide, Foundations of Success, The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, Rare, and the World Commission on Protected Areas/IUCN. Foundations of Success also serves as the coordinator of CMP. (Click here for contact information for each of these organizations)

The mission of CMP is to advance the practice of conservation by developing, testing, and promoting principles and tools to credibly assess and improve the effectiveness of conservation actions.  Each organization within CMP has biodiversity conservation as its primary goal, has a focus on field-based conservation actions, and is working to develop better approaches to project design, management, and assessment. CMP members have come together to work on issues related to impact assessment and accountability because they believe that, collectively, they have a greater chance of making significant progress on designing and implementing effective monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems.

What does CMP do?

By participating in CMP, member organizations seek to capitalize on their individual and collective experience to avoid duplication of effort, bypass tried but failed approaches, and quickly identify and adopt best practices. We believe that CMP will serve as a dynamic and active catalyst for promoting innovation in monitoring and evaluation in conservation. CMP will not be a passive network of institutions that occasionally meets to discuss relevant issues. Instead, CMP has developed a workplan to identify and resolve the conservation community’s most intractable M&E problems. More specifically, CMP will develop a set of mutually acceptable standards for designing, implementing, assessing, and auditing conservation projects.

To fulfill its mission CMP will:

• Create a lexicon of approaches to conservation planning, adaptive management, and measuring effectiveness.
• Validate a set of project cycle or adaptive management standards for the effective   practice of conservation;
• Develop recommendations for effectively reporting the impact of conservation interventions;
• Develop and validate the process for conducting conservation audits;
• Conduct a set of pilot audits of CMP conservation projects and activities; and
• Communicate regularly with the broader conservation practitioner and donor communities to share what it has learned.

CMP has roots both in the conservation and donor communities. During the July 2002 annual meeting of the Society for Conservation Biology, members of the USAID-funded Global Conservation Program – in particular WWF-US, WCS and TNC – called together conservation practitioners who shared similar questions and concerns about how we monitor and measure conservation success. Participating organizations included the CMP members listed above and additional conservation organizations and donors from the UK and US. Participants presented their work on M&E, impact assessment, and auditing, identified gaps in knowledge and practice, and planned for future collaboration to address pressing issues. The meeting proved timely, providing a much-needed forum to help coalesce work on M&E across the field of conservation and catalyzing collective action.

Many individual organization efforts also led directly to the establishment of CMP. In particular, M&E and auditing efforts in TNC, WWF, WCS, CI, and FOS all contributed to increased awareness among conservation organizations that these issues could best be tackled together. In the months leading up to the meeting in Canterbury, representatives from these organizations had begun to discuss ways of collaborating more effectively.

The second meeting of CMP took place in Washington, DC in early November 2002. During this meeting, CMP representatives reviewed draft M&E process standards and developed a draft workplan to formally establish CMP. At present, CMP is exploring opportunities to work with other conservation community representatives – including donor, bilateral, and multilateral organizations.