Exploring connections among the multiple outputs and outcomes emerging from 25 years of sea turtle conservation in Northern Cyprus

Abstract

Monitoring and evaluation is an essential stage of conservation implementation, offering a wide variety of benefits including the ability to engage in informed adaptive management. Understanding the relationship among actions, outputs, and outcomes can inform on factors acting to facilitate or hinder conservation success. Assessing these relationships is particularly important for projects with both social and ecological objectives given that they likely operate through a more complex theory of change. Performance measurement studies that assess both ecological and social variables can offer an informative and cost-effective evaluation method for such projects, but simultaneous social-ecological evaluation is rarely implemented. Using the case study of the Marine Turtle Conservation Project in North Cyprus, we aimed to demonstrate how social-ecological performance measure protocols can aid sea turtle conservation efforts in adaptive management through informing on connections among project actions, outputs, and outcomes. Our study employed a mixed-methods performance measurement approach integrating three distinct data sources: 31 project publications, the project’s long-term dataset on sea turtle ecology, and 26 semi-structured interviews with key informants including residents, fishermen, local business owners, and project staff. The results indicated that the project has generated a wide range of social, economic, and ecological outcomes. Two primary connections among social and ecological factors emerged: 1) bridging the research-implementation gap through directing research into policy action and 2) enhanced operational capacity and achievement of ecological outcomes through extensively engaging with the community and generating local economic benefits. Insufficient government enforcement and a lack of widespread behavioural change on turtle nesting beaches were primary barriers. This study highlights the benefits of multi-disciplinary conservation and demonstrates the insight that can be gained from rapid, social-ecological performance measurement approaches. Channelling such information back into conservation through adaptive management can serve to both increase the achievement of ecological goals and improve human wellbeing.