Best practice guidelines for assessing social impacts and legitimacy of conservation policy instruments. Policymix WP5

The POLICYMIX guidelines for assessing social impacts and legitimacy of conservation policy instruments are part of a set of guidelines for examining the role of economic instruments in policy mixes for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services provision. Other guidelines produced under the POLICYMIX project cover ecological effectiveness, valuation and institutions. Case studies carried out at national and local level in several countries have researched the issues addressed in this set of guidelines, providing an opportunity to test the guidelines and to generate concrete examples of their application. This brief summarises the main elements of the guidelines for social impacts and legitimacy, bringing in examples from the case studies to illustrate particular questions1. The emphasis of these guidelines is on setting out a framework of key concepts and questions that are relevant to conservation policy instruments, rather than on giving a detailed account of data collection methods. Some of these methods, for example household surveys, are common to a number of the guidelines and extensive generic guidance exists.