Conservation practitioners are increasingly accustomed to using connectivity models to identify important movement pathways and corridors. Unfortunately, identifying important pathways is only the first step towards building a connected network of habitats for wildlife. The challenges of the social, political, and economic landscape are often invoked as the key obstacles practitioners face as they try to move from planning to implementation.
Williamson, M.A., Parrott, L., Carter, N.H. and Ford, A.T. 2023. Implementation resistance and the human dimensions of connectivity planning. People and Nature. DOI: 10.1002/pan3.10525.
What if we had a better way to anticipate those challenges and make decisions that reflect both the biophysical costs an animal experiences moving across the landscape, and the socio-political costs a practitioner faces as they try to conserve those pathways?
Implementation resistance extends the ideas of biophysical resistance that underlie our least-cost and circuit-theoretic models of connectivity to consider the ‘costs’ a conservation practitioner may face in trying to move from connectivity planning to action. By incorporating a variety of social, economic, and political variables into spatially explicit surfaces that can be analyzed using existing approaches, practitioners can answer questions like:
- How much do we lose ecologically if we take advantage of favorable socio-political conditions?
- How might typical conservation interventions alter the socio-political landscape? And do those interventions benefit connectivity conservation?
- How do we align interventions with the locations most in need of conservation?
Implementation resistance is important because effective connectivity conservation will often require successful interventions across the entirety of a corridor or risk creating ecological dead-ends. Implementation resistance is also important because the socio-political landscape is often easier to change than topography or the location of physical infrastructure.
Indeed, by targeting investment in incentives, collaboration and institutional development, we can build social overpasses to overcome persistent barriers to conservation. Despite the complexity involved in characterizing implementation resistance, failing to do so means failing to implement.
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