Making Space for Evaluation to Strengthen Conservation Innovation

Abstract

Providing growing global populations with sustainable sources of clean water, food, and energy are existential grand challenges rapidly growing in magnitude and severity. These challenges are exacerbated by wicked social-ecological problems like climate change that make formulaic, one-size-fits-all solutions impossible. Managing these challenges increasingly calls for the engagement of citizen and professional networks in partnerships to advance transformative, social-ecological innovations. Such innovations aim to radically redesign our ways of living and working together to better balance our productivity, prosperity, and conservation of natural resources. Cooperative extension, soil and water conservation, and other community-situated conservation professionals are well-situated to play critical roles in developing and supporting such innovation partnerships. But incremental innovation diffusion strategies that are likely familiar and typically utilized by these institutions are ill-suited to the complexity of transformative innovation. More promising is facilitating adaptive innovation management, or collaboration and social learning processes that strengthen and support partnership capabilities for co-experimenting with transformative solutions. However, there is a critical need to refine and make widespread the practice of adaptive innovation management. This dissertation aims to support the widespread practice of adaptive innovation management through building understanding of how and when to productively integrate evaluation to enhance and accelerate innovation through structuring systematic processes of questioning, collecting, and analyzing social-ecological data, called evaluative thinking. The following chapters describe results and implications of an integrative theory and a sequence of three studies focused on an exemplary University of Minnesota innovation partnership, the Regional Sustainable Development Partnerships (RSDP). A first integrative theory characterizes innovation as a practice of group learning through collaborative deliberation and experimentation that can be accelerated and supported through semi-structured interventions, called adaptive innovation management. It describes how evaluative thinking is an inherent dimension of learning to grow and scale conservation-focused innovations and illuminates how certain developmental evaluation approaches are promising to guide efforts to strengthen evaluative thinking in conservation innovation partnerships like RSDP. A second study describes using a modified-Delphi method to reach consensus among a select group of experienced professionals about important considerations for deciding how and when to infuse developmental evaluation into partnership innovation practices. Three frameworks of important concepts and conceptual dimensions are developed for evaluative thinking, effective developmental evaluation design, and partnership evaluation capacities that can be assessed to guide the integration of developmental evaluation. These frameworks are then used in a set of RSDP case studies to illuminate strategies for effectively integrating developmental evaluation into partnership activities. One case study describes the analysis of survey and qualitative data to identify strategies to help RSDP leaders manage perceived challenges with integrating evaluation into partnership activities. A second case study describes certain RSDP learning activities and written artifacts that are opportune starting points for efficiently and effectively integrating developmental evaluation to strengthen innovation learning practice. Scholarly and practical motivations for doing this are threefold: 1) to inform the growing literature on transdisciplinary approaches to develop and enhance conditions for social-ecological innovation, 2) to improve understanding in the emergent discipline of developmental evaluation about how it can function in the context of such conditions, and 3) to guide land grant organizational development to strengthen social-ecological innovation.