8 Making Decisions for Policy and Practice

Having collaborated with the community to decide upon the objectives, identified the major threats to be addressed, considered the possible options and assessed the evidence, the next stage is to decide what to do. Many decisions can be decided easily, as either obvious or trivial, thus requiring no additional assessment of different stages of the process. The harder decisions then require assessing the likely consequences of options and determining the preferred trade off. There is a range of approaches for making each of these stages more rigorous, reducing the likelihood of making inefficient decisions. These approaches are described with an account of the situations under which is most appropriate to address the conservation problem.