If you work in a conservation organisation, social science consultants can offer huge value to your mission. They can bring efficiencies, extra capacity and expertise to your environmental work and research. 

In this blog I share how social science consultants can support you and your organisation, as well as how things can go wrong if not managed effectively. And next time on the blog we’ll explore more fully how to engage with social science consultants to avoid some potential pitfalls and set your project up for success. 

Why engage a social science consultant?

I am delighted that, increasingly, conservation organisations recognise and welcome social science research into their work. Understanding the human dimensions of conservation is critical to achieving long term, sustainable solutions to environmental challenges.

If you’re in a conservation organisation at the early stages of integrating social science evidence, a consultant can be a helpful way of harnessing the people elements of research as they apply to your mission. Building social science capacity within an organisation so that it is truly integrated takes time, yet you want to ensure you aren’t missing out on valuable social science input in the meantime. A social science consultant could be exactly what you need to bridge the gap in capacity before you’re ready to perhaps employ one or more social scientists in-house.

And if you’re in a conservation organisation with existing social science expertise, it’s likely you may also want to engage a consultant from time to time. They can fill expertise gaps on individual projects, or components of projects, and boost your organisation’s capacity by working with your in-house team to fulfil funding and research objectives. 

What services can social science consultants provide? 

Now we come to a critical aspect of ensuring success when working with a social science consultant: knowing what you need! Social science consultants can offer a range of services at all stages of a research project, including (but not limited to):

Needs assessments: a consultant can be commissioned to identify and analyse the needs, priorities, and concerns of various stakeholders involved in or impacted by a particular conservation issue, and to define the key research questions. This material can then be used to bid for funding.

Literature reviews: you can commission a consultant to synthesise existing research, and identify patterns, trends and knowledge gaps.  

Research design: from determining which methods will be most effective for achieving your research aims, to considering ethical considerations, to designing data collection, a consultant can support your organisation in appropriate research design. 

Research delivery: a consultant can be deployed in the field, either supporting others in conducting interviews, questionnaires or workshops, or taking on that component of the project on behalf of your organisation. 

Analysis and evaluation: a consultant can conduct qualitative data analysis of text based data such as that collected through interviews, focus groups or required for document analysis.  Other consultants may specialise in quantitative social science analysis.  Some may be experienced in mixed methods research and be particularly helpful with projects requiring both text and numerical data.  

Communication: a consultant can synthesise findings and prepare research reports, position papers and other communication materials or events tailored to your stakeholders’ needs. They may also be able to help with forming policy recommendations or working collaboratively with communications consultants to develop the most impactful outputs for your project.  

Training: some consultants offer training to support your in-house team to develop social science knowledge and skills. This might be tailored to a particular need relating to a research project, or focussed on improving social science literacy throughout your organisation.  (And yes, if you’re curious this is something I do!)

Collaborative approaches: whilst some projects are small and may require only one consultant, others may require a range of skills, potentially bringing in a team or multiple roles.  This could include work on participatory approaches, conflict resolution, community engagement, citizen/community science, communications and more.

In short, social science consultants can support your work at any stage of the research process: and the key to ensuring a good working relationship and positive outcomes is being clear about what you need, and the parameters of their role. I’ll go into this in more depth on the next blog, but for now, let’s look at some of the ways enlisting a social science consultant can go awry.

How can things go wrong?

It’s important to state from the outset that this is not about blaming consultants or clients.  Sometimes, as with any aspect of life or work, things do go wrong – the purpose of highlighting these examples is to reduce the chance of similar outcomes occurring for you.In my decades of working in social science conservation, I have come across situations where the outcomes from working with a social science consultant have been less than optimal, and I will outline three of those ‘actually happened’ scenarios here:

1. A lack of in-house skills  

In this case, the social science consultant had fully met the terms of their brief. They had conducted and reported on a set of qualitative data collection and analysis processes , all to a high standard. Unfortunately, the team who had commissioned work lacked the confidence to communicate consultants’ results because the in-house team didn’t understand the qualitative methods or analysis and therefore didn’t have the confidence to use the outputs. 

Therefore, the organisation couldn’t make full use of the evidence to support their conservation goals. 

2. The consultant was poor quality

As with any industry, sometimes you hire someone who is a poor fit for the role. In this case, a social science consultant was commissioned to take on a component of the research as an in-house social science team was overstretched. The consultant’s work was poor quality, so the in-house team found themselves in the situation of having to review and repeat some of the work to bring it up to standard, despite not really having the capacity. 

3. Silo working

If you’re a conservation organisation with a well established team of ecologists and no social science capacity, it can be tempting to run the ecological side of the research in-house, and commission a consultant to ‘do the social science bit’. However, unless the planning and design of the research is undertaken in collaboration, you can find the research happens on parallel tracks and it’s difficult to align ecological and social findings.  I’ve seen this happen where social science, and social scientists are seen as an optional extra rather than an integral part of a conservation project. 

Making the most of working with a social science consultant

The next blog will go into detail of how to commission a social science consultant effectively, so as to avoid some of these pitfalls. But for now, I’ll close with the words of Laura Perry, a conservation social science consultant who works internationally with NGOs, state agencies and businesses:

I think, like all things, hiring a specialist social scientist is exactly what you make of it. It can be a waste of money, or it can be totally revolutionary, and what you put in is what you get out of the process. 

I help conservation organisations build their social science capacity. One of the ways I do this is by training conservation professionals in the essentials of social science. This sets you up for a much more fruitful process if you do engage a social science consultant. You can read more about what’s included in the Essentials of Conservation Social Science one day course, and book onto upcoming dates, here.