Evaluating Conservation (Terell Erickson)
Channel: Ronald Cannarella
Date: 02/06/2012

A Presentation at the Hawai`i Conservation Conference 2007 by Terrell Erickson (USDA/NRCS, College Park, MD) on "Evaluating Conservation". Measuring conservation effectiveness is a new and expanding field, with its own parameters and language. The Office of Management and Budget’s Program Assessment Ranking Tool (PART) elucidates what the government wants federal agencies to do to be accountable. It may seem like “bean counting” to many, yet its bottom line is to show effectiveness and efficiency in our programs and actions. How effective are we as natural resource managers? Programs and actions are evaluated on numerous levels, top-down, i.e., Congress (General Accounting Office) or agencies (i.e. Office of the Inspector General), or internally, such as my work with the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). My presentation will focus on the framework of these types of evaluations, and how and why they got started. I’ll also discuss challenges the “audit” structure brings to the ecological arena, with examples from NRCS.

Hawaii Conservation Alliance
Executive Producer: Ronald Cannarella