The practice of biodiversity conservation is a relatively new and complex enterprise. Any organization working alone to meet conservation goals is unlikely to have either fully adequate resources or the appropriate expertise needed to create successful projects.
Some organizations are more effective at reaching their conservation goals than others.
Increasingly, various types of strategic alliances are being formed between a range of local, national, and international organizations in hopes of sharing costs and pooling resources to increase the likelihood of success and realize effective biodiversity conservation. While strategic alliances have been around for awhile, there is still much to learn about which characteristics of institutional partnerships are key to engendering effective alliances and promoting conservation success. To better understand what makes conservation organizations and partnerships most effective, we have developed three main goals for the study. BCN was designed to determine the conditions under which community-based enterprises that are founded on the sustainable use of natural resources lead to better conservation. BCN has already collected extensive data to examine this relationship and much of these data are being used for the AAM Role of NGOs study.