Making it Count! Adapting Performance Evaluation to Network Governance in Large Landscape Conservation

Network governance is emerging as a central organizing feature in natural resource management and conservation because it has the capacity to transcend jurisdictional boundaries, integrate issues across agency domains, and include public, private, and nonprofit participants in collaboration. Both networks and evaluation metrics vary across institutional contexts, presenting challenges to objectively link networked processes with on-the-ground outcomes. This paper synthesizes previous work in collaborative performance evaluation, social network analysis, and social-ecological network governance to discuss the challenges noted in the evaluation literature on “counting” network outcomes, particularly in landscape conservation. We draw on the insights of social network analysis in evaluation research to propose a framework that evaluates ecological outcomes, the network itself, and the value-added benefits to network participants. We discuss this framework in the real world context of the Crown of the Continent landscape.