Comments Editor’s Note: Conservation Biology does in fact have a manuscript category that addresses what the author suggests. The category Conservation in Practice is meant to address real-life successes and failures in conservation. We have always welcomed manuscripts that show not only successful but failed attempts at implementation of conservation science.
Failing but Learning: Writing the Wrongs after Redford and Taber ANDREW T. KNIGHT DST-NRF Centre of Excellence, Percy FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology, University of Cape Town, Private Bag X3, Rondebosch 7701, South Africa
Nobody enjoys failure, particularly scientists. The competition for funding is fierce and the importance of reputation paramount. Conservation scientists also bear the added burden of knowing that although successes may directly contribute toward stemming the ongoing environmental crisis, failures probably mean fewer resources and even more significantly, less time available for nature conservation. Although failure is usually considered best avoided, Redford and Taber’s (2000) insightful paper highlights the vital importance of acknowledging and sharing failures for learning to “do” effective conservation. They call upon conservation organizations to willingly admit and document failures so as to promote the “safe-fail” culture essential for establishing adaptive resource management systems. Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge, no conservation organizations have heeded their call. Reading Redford and Taber’s (2000) editorial proved a seminal moment in my evolution as a conservation professional. I felt challenged and compelled to heed their call for “writing the wrongs;” my own experience concurred with their wisdom. So, I offer an account of failure in conservation, along with a few hard-won lessons, in the hope this small contribution triggers the snowballing of a safefail culture within the conservation community. Learning to do conservation better depends on it. Between 1995 and 2000 the Australian Nature Conservation Agency funded the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) to pilot a bioregional approach to the expansion of the National Reserve Sys-
tem. Founded upon a national, cooperatively developed, bioregionalization (Thackway & Cresswell 1995), the Cobar Peneplain Project (CPP; see Dick 2000) was the flagship project of a national program designed to usher in a new era in systematic conservation planning. We had ambitious and noble goals. We aimed to establish a learning approach to develop and test new methodologies for the integrated application of the range of activities required for enacting bioregional management, which included application of environmental surrogates for priority-area identification and acquisition, inclusive of Aboriginal heritage values, active community involvement, and off-reserve conservation. We attempted to redefine the manner in which the NPWS practiced conservation by integrating geographically and operationally diverse sections of the organization through a shared “bioregional planning mindset” (Miller 1996) that could be replicated in other bioregions. Despite the best efforts of a small band of individuals who were passionate about the prospects of bioregional planning for nature conservation, the project was, by almost any measure, a failure. The identified candidate priority conservation areas (Smart et al. 2000) still await purchase, and off-reserve conservation initiatives await implementation. The systematic assessment techniques have not been applied to land acquisition generally. The goodwill and relationships built through the Aboriginal liaison and community involvement programs and the integration of expertise throughout the organization have faded. The report series (see Dick 2000), gathering dust
Current address: Department of Botany, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, P.O. Box 77000, Port Elizabeth 6031, South Africa, email
[email protected] Paper submitted April 27, 2005; revised manuscript accepted September 8, 2005.
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on shelves, is the only tangible evidence remaining of an ambitious, potentially revolutionary initiative. So what went wrong? The reasons for the failure of CPP are complex but typical of real-world conservation planning initiatives: no high-level political champion with vision, agency failure to fund corporate objectives, external funding reallocated to competing initiatives, institutional in-fighting, land acquisition priorities sidestepped for managers’ personal preferences, and knowledge drain through high staff turnover. We tried to document these failings in the concluding report series; the technical limitations are easily explained (e.g., Smart et al. 2000), but on rereading the accounts of the management failings (some of which were mine) they seem to lack incisive direction to future workers, perhaps because we lack a culture of documenting failure in the conservation sciences and hence an honesty that brings clarity to written works. Definitions of failure depend on one’s perspective; as a learning opportunity the CPP was particularly rich. So, what did we learn? The most important lessons concerned people. The project was unsuccessful at encouraging staff toward the bioregional planning mindset (Miller 1996). As individuals, we lacked the “people skills” to close the deal; being passionate about nature conservation was not enough. Scientists receive little or no training in the skills required for functioning in the real world (Soul´e 1986), and we were no exception. We discovered that being an effective conservation planner is as much about how to collaborate with people as it is about having the technical, systematic conservation assessment skills and knowledge of a region’s natural history to decide where conservation action is required. Knowing what to do is just not enough (Pfeffer & Sutton 1999). Through this experience dawned the realization of the importance of fusing good science with a good bedside manner. Stakeholders became individual people with idiosyncratic values and behaviors, rather than a collective to be ushered toward our desired goal. We also learned the importance of experimentation (Redford & Taber 2000) and, inadvertently, the essential significance of a safe-fail culture. My colleagues provided a context in which testing new approaches was encouraged and failure was informally assessed through discussion. They were respectful, humble, and accepting, and as a result, we were strengthened by our failures because we collectively learned from them. Redford and Taber (2000) proclaim that developing a safe-fail culture within conservation organizations is critical for effective conservation and that documenting experiences, particularly our failures, is a fundamental activity for doing effective conservation. I wish to extend the value of failure further. We cannot act wisely without knowledge, and we will not act wisely without feeling (Allendorf 1997). Conservation professionals and stakeholders are people, and as individual people, failure defines our collective humanity.
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If we cannot admit our failures, we forsake our vulnerability as individuals and hence abandon our opportunities for professional (and personal) improvement. It is in the acknowledgment of our own and others’ vulnerability that trust is nurtured. Trust provides the fertile ground for nurturing the relationships on which social learning and adaptive management depend, and cultivates in others the humility, respect, and acceptance essential to the safe-fail culture. Humility, respect, and acceptance are not scientific principles. However, they are the defining characteristics of conservation professionals who are effective at implementing conservation on the ground because they are emotionally intelligent (Ciarrochi et al. 2001), equally value different knowledge traditions, consciously foster consilience ( Wilson 1998), and pursue excellence over the need for influence (R. Cowling, personal communication). They refuse to be party to the much-cited divide between scientists and practitioners or be shielded from public scrutiny by the ivory towers of elitist scientific institutions (Soul´e 1986). They do not measure their success with publications in influential journals or hide behind the often senseless jargon of scientific disciplines (Peters 1991). I applaud and admire my colleagues who have put the improvement of conservation practice above personal success, who not only muddy their boots in the trenches of real-world conservation activities, but who then bare their souls to criticism by documenting the failings through which they have learned how to do conservation (e.g., Groves 2003, p. 43; Gelderblom et al. 2003, p. 295). Although science favors questions it knows it can solve (Medawar 1967), those involved in on-the-ground conservation grapple with problems regardless of the surety of finding answers because once conservation opportunities are gone, they are lost forever. So conservationists should not fear uncertainty, but rather embrace it as the rich source of our failing and hence our learning to do more effective conservation. Conservation Biology is committed to circulating good information to support the practice of our discipline (Meffe 2001). I believe documenting and learning from failures is so important that I challenge the journal to implement a new manuscript category, “Failing but Learning.” Herein, short case studies would detail learning processes that lead to improvements in conservation practice through failures. Knowing that failure is worth a publication in a leading journal might encourage conservation professionals to take their courage in hand, publically document their failures, and thereby promote the safefail learning culture essential for ensuring we individually and collectively do better conservation. I (perhaps wistfully) hope this paper triggers an avalanche of similar narratives of failure and learning to counter the bravado of those consistently reporting only success. Who among you will heed Redford and Taber’s call?
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Acknowledgments K. Redford and A. Taber provided insight and inspiration. P. Creaser and R. Dick supported learning through experimentation, making mistakes, and intervened with laughter along the way. R. Cowling and E. Foster actively supported my failing and learning despite the costs. R. Cowling, P. Creaser, R. Dick, S. Pierce, and K. Redford provided thoughtful reviews of earlier drafts. Literature Cited Allendorf, F. W. 1997. The conservation biologist as Zen student. Conservation Biology 11:1045–1046. Ciarrochi, J., J. P. Forgas, and J. D. Mayer. 2001. Emotional intelligence in everyday life. Psychology Press, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Dick, R. C., editor. 2000. A multi-faceted approach to regional conservation assessment in the Cobar Peneplain biogeographic region. New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service, Sydney. Gelderblom, C. M., B. W. van Wilgen, J. L. Nel, T. Sandwith, M. A. Botha, and M. Hauck. 2003. Turning strategy into action: implementing a conservation action plan in the Cape Floristic Region. Biological Conservation 112:291–297. Groves, C. R. 2003. Drafting a conservation blueprint: a practitioner’s guide to planning for biodiversity. Island Press, Washington, D.C.
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Medawar, P. B. 1967. The art of the soluble. Methuen & Co., London. Meffe, G. K. 2001. Crisis in a crisis discipline. Conservation Biology 15:303–304. Miller, K. R. 1996. Balancing the scales: guidelines for increasing biodiversity’s chances through bioregional management. World Resources Institute, Washington, D.C. Peters, R. H. 1991. A critique for ecology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom. Pfeffer, J., and R. I. Sutton. 1999. Knowing “what” to do is not enough: turning knowledge into action. California Management Review 42:83–107. Redford, K. H., and A. Taber. 2000. Writing the wrongs: developing a safe-fail culture in conservation. Conservation Biology 14:1567– 1568. Smart, J., A. T. Knight, and M. Robinson. 2000. A conservation assessment for the Cobar Peneplain biogeographic region—methods and opportunities. New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service, Sydney. Soul´e, M. E. 1986. Conservation biology and the “real world.” Pages 1–12 in M. E. Soul´e, editor. Conservation biology: the science of scarcity and diversity. Sinauer Associates, Sunderland, Massachusetts. Thackway, R., and I. D. Cresswell, editors. 1995. An interim biogeographic regionalisation for Australia: a framework for establishing the National System of Reserves. Version 4.0. Australian Nature Conservation Agency, Canberra. Wilson, E. O. 1998. Consilience: the unity of knowledge. Abacus, London.
