Priority Places for Species at Risk · Canadian Wildlife Service · Environment and Climate Change Canada
Making Collaboration Visible, Measurable, and Actionable
We measured what a national biodiversity program had no way to see: whether its stakeholder networks were actually working.
The context
A national program built on collaboration — with no way to measure it
Canada's Pan-Canadian Approach to Species at Risk Conservation was built on a clear premise: that federal, provincial, territorial, and Indigenous governments, working alongside communities, landowners, and NGOs, could achieve conservation outcomes no single actor could reach alone. Priority Places were the unit of that ambition: geographically defined areas, both federally designated and community-nominated, where multi-stakeholder networks would collaborate to protect biodiversity at landscape scale.
The design was right. The gap was measurement. The Canadian Wildlife Service could map habitat, track species populations, and account for expenditures. What they could not see, with any consistency or precision, was whether the human networks holding the program together were functioning, fragile, or structurally dependent on a handful of people.
What we did
From methodology design to a national workshop
01 · Methodology design
Designed the SNPI data collection instrument: a structured survey built to translate relational behaviour into quantifiable network indicators, calibrated to the program's own partnership criteria.
02 · Coordinated data collection
Working through CWS headquarters in Ottawa, coordinated outreach to network leaders across Canada, who distributed the survey to their members across 12+ Priority Place networks, both federally designated and community-nominated.
03 · Analysis and reporting
Curated, cleaned, and analysed data to generate site-level and cross-site network performance indicators: centrality, density, brokerage, and collaboration intensity for each Priority Place.
04 · National workshop
Presented findings in a live interactive session at CWS headquarters in Ottawa, streamed simultaneously to site coordinators and network leaders across the country.
The moment it landed
People recognising themselves in the data
As we walked through the findings indicator by indicator, people weren't receiving it as a technical report. They were recognising themselves in the data. Site coordinators streaming in from across the country were responding in real time: "That makes sense, we all came together on that one project, that's why the connection shows up so strongly there." The numbers were confirming things people already knew intuitively but had never been able to show. That back-and-forth confirmed that the tool was genuinely speaking to what they experienced on the ground.
One point in particular drew a lot of attention: network centralization, and what to do about it.
Centralization, it turned out, was not really about power concentration. It was about where capacity-building hadn't happened yet. The path toward a more resilient and distributed network isn't dismantling what's working at the centre. It's deliberately developing people at the edges so they can take on more connected roles. The site coordinators in the room — people who manage the daily tension between getting things done now and building the people who could do them later — felt that reframe immediately. It named something real.
Value created
What the program gained
Site-level engagement intelligence
For each Priority Place, CWS gained a precise picture of network structure: who was central, where collaboration was strong, where it was thin, and where structural dependence created fragility. This directly informed how program officers engaged each site going forward.
National program performance reporting
For the first time, CWS could report upstream to the department and to Treasury Board on the social dimension of national program performance. The collaboration the program was built on could now be demonstrated, not just described.
A new instrument for a persistent gap
The SNPI methodology demonstrated that social network indicators can be collected, standardised, and reported across a national multi-site program, and that they carry institutional weight.
Strategic clarity on governance
The centralization insight gave network leaders a concrete framework for tensions they already felt: intentional capacity-building as the practical path to more democratic and resilient conservation governance.
If your program depends on collaboration, we can measure it
If your program depends on collaboration but has no way to measure whether it is working, that gap is exactly what we are built to close.
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