SBCC Good practice guidelines

The SBCC Community of Practice is a panel of experts with a stake, passion, interest or mandate in changing wildlife product consumer choice, brought together through the Wildlife Consumer Behaviour Change Toolkit, managed by TRAFFIC.

The SBCC Good Practice Guidelines have been developed primarily under the USAID-funded Wildlife Trafficking, Response, Assessment, and Priority Setting (Wildlife TRAPS) Project led by TRAFFIC, in collaboration with several experts in impact evaluation, consumer research survey design and the measurement of behavioural change. 

The Guidelines respond to a need identified by participants at a March 2016 workshop on “Changing Behaviour to Reduce Demand for Illegal Wildlife Products.” This seminal event for the sector was attended by around 100 people from 60+ organisations, who recognised the need to strengthen demand reduction impact measurement, a call recently also reinforced through a background briefing prepared by the Secretariat to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). 

According to the CITES briefing: “The Secretariat recognizes that there is a clear distinction between the reach of a campaign and the impact of a campaign on people’s behaviour, and it is the latter that we need to make greater efforts to maximize. A mass campaign or a mistargeted campaign may reach a significant number of audience, including through traditional platforms and on social media and get a lot of coverage. However, the role they play in changing the behaviours of key consumers may be insignificant. Well targeted, species-specific and evidence-based campaigns that engage key consumer groups and target the motivations for the demand are what Resolution Conf. 17.4 calls for and what the Secretariat is focused on.”

The suitability, scope and purpose of the new SBCC Good Practice Guidelines were evaluated during an “Expert Roundtable” on Demand Reduction Impact Measurement, hosted by TRAFFIC at the Oxford Martin Programme on Illegal Wildlife Trade Symposium (27–29 September, 2017). There, it was recognised that the Guidelines are an important step towards improved practice in that they provide accessible reference material around how to set baselines and cross-reference subjective expressions of change against those more objectively verifiable. They also support research to identify what works and what does not, and to inform adaptive management of SBCC and demand reduction messages, messengers and mechanisms. 

Sections within the new Guidelines focus on how to prepare baselines, formative and summative research approaches, and there is also a checklist for those commissioning consumer surveys.

The Guidelines are intended to be a “living” resource, and further feedback is welcomed from members of the SBCC Community of Practice through the discussion forums hosted on the Wildlife Consumer Behaviour Change Toolkit.