People matters: the Nature Conservancy's use of social science tools to understand and work within the human context of conservation

This report looks at specific techniques to the enable the rapid understanding of human systems and dynamics in an ecoregion or conservation site. It examines current use across The Nature Conservancy (TNC) of tools from the social sciences to understand key aspects of human systems.

The authors begin by describing applications of several commonly used tools to the Conservancy’s work and uses a wide range of illustrative case studies primarily of TNC work in North America. The report then assesses the tools’ value as well as TNC’s internal capacity in the social sciences. The final section of the report summarizes several crosscutting issues and identifies several steps for future action.

From the study they identified three general challenges that lie ahead for more fully integrating social science approaches into the fabric of the Conservancy’s work.

• First, TNC presently lacks a general conceptual framework to guide staff on where in the Conservation Process and how they should characterize, assess, and strategize about relevant human activities.
• Second, the Conservancy’s total capacity in the social sciences is quite small. A pressing need exists to leverage the full potential of internal and external sources of expertise and knowledge by networking them in some meaningful manner and making these resources systematically available to conservation planners and site practitioners across the organization.
• Finally, fully exploiting the potential for social science to enhance conservation success will require not only refining techniques already in use, but also spurring innovation. Developing new approaches to fill presently unmet information needs will require importing and testing the most promising approaches of other organizations and better integrating external social scientists into the Conservancy’s work.

[authors]