Capacity building

Unless the Zonation project you are planning is guaranteed to be a one-off event, you might want to pay some attention to how the project could be repeated in the future. If you are working in an organization that is considering using Zonation in a particular process or even as part of developing new decision-support processes, you will certainly want to consider what it takes from an organizational perspective.

Chapter 1 has already given you an idea on what are the general considerations and the expected investments in terms of time and money for an organization. The points made in Chapter 1 are largely based on our own experience on working with various collaborators within and beyond academia. Especially in organizations working with operative environmental management, introducing Zonation into the toolset used may seem like a mostly technical challenge. Having the technical capacity to run Zonation analyses is of course required, but as this document has hopefully demonstrated, many other skills are required and most of the time is spent in doing something else than running Zonation. This means that using Zonation, and doing spatial conservation prioritization in more general, requires building of capacity from data manipulation to communication of the results and everything else between.

Team work is also about having partly overlapping capacities. At best, everyone from data manager to the ones writing the final report would understand the basics of Zonation analysis. At best, the planning and implementation of a prioritization project is a group effort where everyone is to some extent involved in each step. In an ideal situation, also those dealing with implementation are actively engaged in the prioritization project and can develop a good understanding about the analyses while they are being developed and executed. Co-learning has already been mentioned in this document several times and here it once again proves to be one of the crucial outcomes of a spatial prioritization project.