It seems that impact is everywhere at the moment. Is our research having impact? Is our teaching having impact? Are conservation actions having the intended impact? These are very important questions, but they are also very difficult to answer, particularly when the things we hope to affect are complex processes that are terribly difficult to untangle (the policy making process, the career development of alumni, or the trajectories of socioecological systems).

Last week Professor Paul Ferraro from Johns Hopkins visited Cambridge as the Humanitas Visiting Professor in Sustainability Studies. Paul is a world leader in analysing the impact of conservation interventions, and a strong advocate of quantitative analysis that properly accounts for things like selection bias in treatments (e.g. the location of protected areas is non-random and this should be considered in impact evaluation). He is in the vanguard of a growing industry of people doing similar work, which increasingly fills the pages of the conservation science journals. To me, this research is fascinating and provides important insights that often challenge widely-held assumptions about things like the relationship between protected areas and poverty. Continue reading →