As the UWF Conservation Program grew from an idea to reality, I continued thinking about what elements combine to make a successful conservation program at a higher education institution (HEI). This stayed at the forefront of my mind as I sought topics for my Masters thesis. At first, I wanted to create an effectiveness assessment that could be applied to such programs… until I realized that “effectiveness” is defined in wildly different ways according to program goals and setting, and it would be completely inappropriate for me to set a narrow definition of “effective” versus “not effective” for programs outside my own university; even there, my perception of success might vary wildly from that of my peers. I finally had my “aha!” moment when I picked up a copy of Managing Protected Areas: A Global Guide. It contained not only an entire chapter dedicated to the concept of capacity but also a sample capacity assessment designed for protected area management systems. As I researched capacity, I found that it can relate to just about any kind of organization and is essential to success – without an outsider having to define what that organization’s “success” would look like. Instead of analyzing a program’s outputs, as an effectiveness assessment might, a capacity assessment looks at inputs to the program: the tools it uses to achieve its goals and how it manages those tools. The results of a capacity assessment can then be used for benchmarking, monitoring program resources over time, and (most importantly) ways that a program can increase its available resources and/or manage its existing resources better. While there are various capacity assessments that already exist, created by groups such as the United Nations Development Programme, I could not find any that were directly applicable to conservation programs at HEIs. I decided to make it my mission to create such a tool.
Currently, the Conservation at Higher Education Institution Capacity Assessment Tool (CHEICAT) exists as a first draft. I based it on several existing capacity assessments: the UNDP-WCMC Capacity Development Assessment Tool, the UNDP Capacity Assessment Supporting Tool, the McKinsey and Company Capacity Assessment Grid, and the UNDP Sample Scorecard for Assessing Protected Area Capacity. A small group of HEI conservation programs have offered to help me improve the CHEICAT by implementing it in their own organizations and completing a follow-up survey. I will use these results to edit the CHEICAT, and the resulting final version will be made available for free on this website. I hope the CHEICAT can serve as a useful open-access resource to support conservation leaders at higher education institutions in their missions.
You can access the current draft of the CHEICAT here. If you do so, please consider completing this optional survey. If you visit this page before January 1, 2026, and are interested in participating in my research to improve the CHEICAT, please email me at adt67@students.uwf.edu!
