Prioritizing and Selecting Strategic Approaches in USAID Biodiversity Programming

This guide supplements the USAID Biodiversity How-To Guides, which have been developed to help design teams, program managers, and implementing partners systematically approach biodiversity conservation design, planning, monitoring, evaluation, and learning within the USAID Program Cycle. The guide outlines the importance of prioritizing strategic approaches, which are sets of actions with a common focus that work together to address specific threats, drivers, and/or opportunities in order to achieve a set of relevant results. A good strategic approach meets the following criteria: it is linked to critical factors in the situation model, focused on specific courses of action, feasible in light of the program's resources and constraints, and appropriate to and fitting within United States Government regulations and host country and/or site-specific cultural, social, and biological norms. The guide assumes that design teams have already completed a situation/problem analysis and possibly developed a situation model, and have brainstormed strategic approaches to help reduce high-priority threats. At this point, they will be ready to prioritize their strategic approaches following the five steps outlined in the guide. These steps include rating each strategic approach for potential impact and feasibility, discarding ineffective strategic approaches, ranking remaining strategic approaches relative to one another, choosing the "final" set of strategic approaches, and revisiting strategic approaches regularly. The guide uses the same fictitious example project – the Grand River project – as used in the three Biodiversity How-To Guides. The Grand River project example's purpose links to a fictitious Country Development Cooperation Strategy component – an Intermediate Result on "Biodiversity conservation for improved well-being of targeted rural communities." Although fictitious, the example is based on real-life conservation contexts. The guide emphasizes the importance of determining which actions to take in the conservation planning process, and going through an evidence-based prioritization process to systematically assess the potential value of different strategic approaches and select those that are likely to have the greatest impact. The guide also provides tips to help guide teams in this important process. In terms of implementation, the guide suggests that design teams consider available evidence when choosing and rating their strategic approaches. The guide also emphasizes the importance of revisiting strategic approaches regularly to ensure that they remain relevant and effective. Overall, the Prioritizing and Selecting Strategic Approaches in USAID Biodiversity Programming guide provides a comprehensive framework for design teams to prioritize and select strategic approaches in biodiversity programming. The guide emphasizes the importance of evidence-based decision-making and regular review of strategic approaches to ensure that they remain effective and relevant.