A Toolkit for Management Planning

Practical advice and tools for Management Planning of conservation landscapes in snow leopard habitat.

To help range countries design conservation action for the 23 landscapes they have identified to be secured under the GLSEP program, the GSLEP secretariat has released (in 2014) – and revised in 2018 – general Guidelines for Management Planning of Snow Leopard Landscapes.

These guidelines were originally designed to provide a handy toolkit to assist in the preparation of scientific, landscape level, climate smart management plans for the GSLEP landscapes in 2014. Since then several range countries worked on management plans for their respective landscapes and shared feedback. One key issue that emerged was that of providing more practical information on important and complex sections of the management plan such as threat assessments, climate smarting, stakeholder consultation and engagement, ensuring better integrated conservation of the area, and fund raising. Also, a need for chapter-wise assistance in writing the plans was expressed.

The GSLEP Secretariat with its partners have worked to incorporate user comments to update the GSLEP Management Planning Guidelines, which were finalized during the GSLEP Steering Committee meeting in Issyk Kul (14-15 June 2018). The present guidelines thus builds on the expressed need for more relevant information covering all chapters of the management plans, which along with the eight thematic addenda are expected to provide a more complete toolkit to the country teams to prepare management plans for the remaining landscapes.

In addition to the general guidelines, a series of advice documents has been released to help guide practitioners through the different steps of the process. The documents are available for download through the links provided below. They cover the following topics: 

1. Addendum 1: Strategic Management Planning in Snow Leopard Landscapes: Salient principles and steps for strategic planning for conservation. Identifying and ranking threats. Relating to systematic processes of conservation planning such as Open Standards.
2. Addendum 2: Participation in Conservation: Salient principles of participation – at both community and institutional levels. Steps to carry out consultations and its analyses. Stakeholder analysis, role of community in conservation, importance of partnerships; participation of government agencies and other civil society organisations. How to pull together all the stakeholders and how to adequately discuss the strategy development with them? Understanding institutional mandates, priorities and recent thrust areas; especially areas of convergence and divergence with conservation goals.
3. Addendum 3: Stakeholder Analysis in Snow Leopard Landscape Management Planning: Ideal variables and tools that can help in the management planning process. Socioeconomic issues can be vast and it is important to prioritize information needed for planning.
4. Addendum 4: Integrated Management and Governance of GSLEP Landscapes: Need to understand existing mechanisms from village to national level for each country. Options for alternate and new structures to streamline works to balance conservation and development. Importance of collaboration among Government and Non-Government agencies. Funding mechanisms. Case study from existing landscape level programs.
5. Addendum 5: Best Practices in Snow Leopard Conservation: Threat mitigation measures drawn from experiences of all range country’s NSLEP document.
6. Addendum 6: Incorporating Climate Change in Snow Leopard Landscape Management Planning: Understanding causes and consequences of climate change in a general sense. Climate change scenarios as reminders for considering activities with long-term impacts. Understanding climate change effects and their potential impacts on snow leopards in particular.
7. Addendum 7: Mapping to Support Snow Leopard Landscape Management Planning: Methods and general approach to determining snow leopard presence, climate change impacts, hydrology and zonation.
8. Addendum 8: Green Resilient Economic Development in Snow Leopard Landscape Management Planning: Development that is environmentally and economically viable and socially equitable. Brief explanation of concepts and terms. Exhaustive list with examples of such development.