Still viable despite criticism: complexities of evaluating the performance of ICDPs

Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDPs) are widely used in countries of the Global South to link conservation with rural socio-economic advances. Notwithstanding, ICDPs face much criticism. A dominant complaint is that ICDPs fail to provide evidence concerning the very purpose they were established for, namely, to erase poverty and institutional capacity barriers, which invariably lead to the reduction of adverse human impacts on nature. Here, I explore the challenges that ICDPs face in seeking to provide empirical proof for positive long-term effects at the local level. I highlight certain specific difficulties in monitoring and evaluating ICDPs, and also examine the role that performance evaluation may play for ICDPs as instruments leading to transformative change. Besides the fact that a diverse set of stakeholders, through negotiations of power, constantly challenge the implementation of ICDPs, I argue that the goals and values of donor parties ultimately drive the overall evaluation and long-term sustainability of ICDPs and will govern transformative change. Future research is needed to explore this relationship more fully.

nated conservation areas (Hughes and Flintan 2001). ICDPs are based on the idea that conservation objectives must go hand in hand with rural development. Projects aim to integrate local populations into conservation activities to reduce pressures on natural resources while simultaneously providing alternative income sources (Hughes and Flintan 2001;Rajski and Papalambros 2021). ICDPs were initially conceptualized for low-income countries in the Global South (Alpert 1996;Brandon 2001). Naturally, as some nations have progressed economically, this has meant that some ICDPs are presently situated in lower and middleincome countries, which contain areas of high conservation value.
Despite laudable intentions to connect people to conservation and vice versa, it is no secret that ICDPs have faced multiple criticisms over the past two decades. Critics often refer to the inherent assumptions upon which ICDPs are based (Hughes and Flintan 2001). These include the following: local populations are the cause of natural resource diminishment; livelihood needs of local populations must be satisfied to reduce pressures on conservation areas; local populations should also be included in conservation management and conservation management considerations both to provide alternative sources of income and to raise awareness for the importance of conservation; and, awareness, and education reduces local population pressures on natural resources. In the past, certain observers have also criticized the broad range of contexts that ICDPs aim to address, making it difficult to focus on the effectiveness of single measures (Robinson and Redford 2004). Some studies also point out that ICDPs prioritize either conservation over socio-economic development or vice versa, leading to a constant imbalance and re-negotiation of actual ends (natural and human welfare) (Baral et al. 2007;Robinson and Redford 2004;Salafsky 2011). Other authors question the contribution of ICDPs to ecology and social development due to missing evidence of a critical number of unambiguously successful examples (Wells and McShane 2004). Despite disappointment over ICDPs, it is interesting that these projects are still considered viable strategies to simultaneously strengthen nature conservation and rural development (rf., GIZ 2022; Huges and Flintant 2021; Reed et al. 2020;Smith 2014;UNEP 2023).
As part of the IPBES' transformative change assessment, Biodiversity & Conservation has called for contributions that define determinants for change and support systems that counteract the degradation of flora and fauna and ecosystems, while considering human needs and well-being. The assessment appeals to delineate thresholds for urgently needed transformative change to reduce ongoing threats to biodiversity and comply with the 2050 Vision for Biodiversity (CBD 2021;IPBES 2022). ICDPs have not only become firmly established tools of international aid policy, but have also become vital instruments for the consideration of biodiversity needs for human lives. In recent decades, no alternatives have evolved that would likewise apply to sustainable development (and often to the monitoring of biodiversity). Neither have similar solutions been brought forward to foster bottom-up approaches, which include local voices in local natural resources management (Salafsky and Margoluis 2004). The combination of biodiversity conservation, local context, and efforts to influence policymaking may still be an appealing mix, which promises success. In other words, the idea is to maintain conservation status while improving human well-being and, thus, rural development (see also CBD 2021). Conversely, external factors that influence and likely hamper ICDPs' implementations and which challenge performance evaluations are often beyond the influence of ICDPs (e.g., demand for specific animal species or wood intensifying poaching and deforestation). These need to be disregarded in the local context since such external factors could impede or restrict the conservation involvement of local populations (Salafsky 2011).
There is, thus, need to discuss the 'shaky performance grounds' upon which ICDPs are often based and the challenges such projects face when generating evidence-based measures. ICDPs have access to a vast amount of knowledge, gathered not only by those who work in these projects but also those they address. This knowledge covers levels ranging from the local/indigenous to the regional and even the national. Based on this, I aim to consider the role that ICDPs may play within a transformative change process. I particularly seek to delineate donors' performance interests in bilateral cooperation projects to help better understand why ICDPs have not been able to widely prove their impact and utility for nature conservation and rural development. Arguably, by understanding performance interests, it is possible to determine the capability of ICDPs to leverage change.

Current evaluation performance of ICDPs and missing linkages
Despite numerous (mostly internal) project reports, which focus on the ecological and human development performance of ICDPs, the academic literature on ICDPs is somewhat sparse. Some authors have critically addressed impacts and linkages to the region in which projects are based (e.g., Chambers et al., 2020;Larsen, 2008). They conclude that ICDPs operate within complex, highly dynamic, context-dependent environments featuring power struggles. Any evaluation of performance and the linkages between conservation and rural development that would justify the existence of ICDPs is very challenging. This is because there is an intricate web of stakeholders, financing structures and governance regimes, and internal and external factors that affect projects (e.g., Wells and McShane 2004).
In his recent contribution on the ecological performance of protected areas, Coetzee (2017) suggests applying a framework developed by Ferraro and Hanauer (2015). This may support a more systematic evaluation that delineates the 'causal pathways' between treatments, the starting point for intervention/implementation (e.g., a protected area designation or management) and outcomes, that is, the ecological or socio-economic outcomes. These pathways can be influenced by deliberate mechanisms/agents, which can be positively or negatively affected by so-called moderators at any given time. A more accurate accounting of the intervention can be achieved by considering the mechanisms and, particularly, the moderators when evaluating performance. Coetzee (2017) proposed an approach to generate more evidence-based indicators to prove the worldwide conservation effectiveness of protected areas.
Furthermore, proving a positive performance of a program can be difficult because of the geographic context of ICPDs. Projects are often established along or even within conservation areas, which already preserve the biodiversity, ecosystem, and/or landscape. It is already challenging to demonstrate a positive ecological impact for the management of such conservation areas precisely because of the foreseen and unforeseen moderators (rf. Coetzee 2017). Consequently, it is problematic for ICDPs to prove their positive influence on conservation, at least regarding ecological conservation.
Nonetheless, the reporting efforts by ICDPs are made to provide such, albeit probably impossible, evidence for positive impacts. There is a great variety of indicators, including, for example, those determining illegal extraction of natural resources. These are based on statistics relating to known violations of the law or derived by using forest cover imagery for determining biodiversity status. They also emerge from biodiversity status reports (counting animals and cases of illegal poaching), the listing of newly established strategic planning instruments, by looking at poverty levels or existing policies for rural development, and many more sources. While such indicators are individually unreliable in predicting and proving linkages between conservation and rural development, the concept of causal pathways and influencing factors have been anchored in many ICDP implementing agencies in the form of results chains or impact matrices. Such tools visualize potential pitfalls and moderators that can affect performance.
ICDPs often run over long timespans and multiple stages, allowing project managers to react to moderators and respond flexibly to unforeseen events. Moreover, funds for each phase are usually released when sound plans, capacity, and independent monitoring demonstrate acceptable compliance with set targets. While this might suggest that some projects run into a dead end, it also promotes more suitable, sometimes novel, frameworks that promise a better fit to local contexts. Project lifespans and the release of funds also minimize the risk of failure and makes performance evaluations more accurate.
Linkages between conservation and human development are accounted for in the form of assumed moderating effects within performance evaluations. Those linkages are, interestingly, held on to despite cases where they have been disproven. For example, Chambers et al. (2020) found that even though farmers in northern Peru had raised their yields, they still further increased their engagement in deforestation activities.

Internal and external performance evaluation
Here, I argue that a perceived indifference towards providing improved linkages between conservation and development comes from the diverging reporting needs of ICDP implementing agencies and their donor institutions. The methods described above are applied in well-structured and functioning projects for 'internal' reporting of operations within diverse working areas of a project. In a classic example, these could cover: livelihood development; forestry; biodiversity monitoring; and other activities like sustainable tourism development, with output indicators referring to capacity building, policy implementation/law enforcement, regional planning, and policy guidance. Internal accounts of accomplishments, reporting to different levels within the implementing agency, is reasonably straightforward and can include qualitative and quantitative data from all involved project stakeholders. Throughout an ICDP project, achieving predicted outputs and meeting the end-of-project outcome indicators are important.
External reporting, that is, reporting from the managing agency to the donor institutions, is less clearcut. Within international cooperation projects, donors include both the foreign country and the 'domestic' country in which the ICDP is carried out, whereby the former commonly holds a larger funding share. Contrary to internal reporting, such external reporting is much less inclusive and may involve only a handful of people, often with little connection to local ICDP operations. External reporting may thus be more susceptible to a reconciliation of outcome indicators. On the one hand, this is due to a 'natural temptation' (Laurance 2013, p.18) towards adjusting reporting due to different sets of values and inter-ests. On the other hand, this is also due to varying understandings of performance measures at the various levels of reporting responsibilities.
At the same time, the interests of different donor institutions may also diverge (e.g. Hughes and Flintan 2021). A 'domestic' donor government may highly value contributions that reflect advances to international agreements to which the 'domestic' donor is a signatory, such as the Convention of Biological Diversity and the Aichi Targets or Agenda 2030, as well as contributions that exemplify economic growth/development perspectives. By contrast, international donors might measure the success of ICDPs based on the funding disbursed and reflections of the respective external donor countries' development and/or environmental politics and international cooperation policies. ICDPs may consider themselves to be intermediaries between policy and its implementation but also as influencers of policymaking.
Similar to Coetzee's (2017) reference to using the ratio of forest cover as an evidence base for positive biological conservation, expenditure has little validity as a measure of the long-term impact of an ICDP at the national level. It also says little about project delivery 'on the ground'. In addition to the vague meaning of funding spent, it reflects more of a 'gross' indicator that includes, for example, expenditures of ICDP employment, participation incentives, material goods, or satellite imagery.

Can ICDPs be determinants for transformative change?
In the past, researchers have examined and discussed potential implementation failures of ICDPs (e.g., Chambers et al. 2020;Salafsky 2011). These result from a mismatch between the historical, geographical, socio-economic, structural, political, institutional, and/or local motivational contexts. Implementing agencies of ICDPs still struggle to prove whether they can contribute to conservation and human development or if conservation and human development are linked. The complex, often chaotic, and demanding environment in which these projects operate often overshadows ICDPs' ability to deliver practical outcomes, suggesting the need for a more pragmatic form of performance evaluation.
Linkages between conservation and rural development are addressed in reporting but are often somewhat speculative. However, implementing agencies and donor parties seem indifferent to assumptions as long as their goals and values are reflected in the overall outcomes. Performance evaluation of well-monitored ICDPs may serve their stakeholders to the extent that it does not interrupt its justification of existence. ICDPs may, in the end, be justified purely by its economic contribution to the local region (e.g., by creating employment and spending in the local economy).
There is, however, also a need to reflect upon ICDPs' potential relevance in a transformative change process that is concerned with ongoing biodiversity loss. I contend that despite all the criticism in evaluating performance, ICDPs are of high relevance. ICDPs already have been shown to be important knowledge holders and generators of biodiversity monitoring and ecosystems data (as well as opportunistic data, including, poaching, logging, mining activities, species tracking, threat maps/tracking pressures, and land cover classifications). Such data vitally determines the initiation and evaluation of change. Projects also provide an opportunity for local stakeholders to engage in linkages that many local institutions likely fail to establish (e.g., with international organisations or NGOs), includ-ing future linkages between the local context and the IPBES transformative change process outcome. Many implementing agencies of ICDPs also have practice and experience in the upscaling of activities, in capacity building at different stakeholder levels, and in introducing benefit-sharing (e.g., community forests) and co-management mechanisms. Many approaches value and integrate indigenous and local knowledge.
Against this background, ICDPs deserve consideration in future discussions within the transformative process, though indeed these are not praised here as a single prescription for driving transformative change. Besides the need to better align activities to national policies (e.g., activities are implemented according to national action plans for biodiversity), or to simplify project structures, I suggest that donor parties review responsibilities, values and goals prescribed to ICDPs concerning the CBDs 2050 vision (CBD 2021). Here, overall indicators of ICDPs should thus not set the primary benchmark for performance. Given a well-functioning and well set up ICDP, failures apparent in performance evaluation should not be ascribed to projects alone: Instead, they should particularly be sought within the compliance of bilateral values and goals that refer to human well-being and living in 'harmony with nature' (rf. CBD 2021).
Future research could examine goals and interests concerning integrated development projects held by various stakeholders within the hierarchical structure of an ICDP. Focusing on reporting the success of ICDPs and the reporting expectations of internal and external donor parties might improve the assessment of these projects. It could also be interesting to examine potential trade-offs made by ICDPs during the implementation process to align with donor objectives and ideologies.