Context 164 - May 2020

C O N T E X T 1 6 4 : M A Y 2 0 2 0 47 Director’s cut Crisis advice for IHBC applicants: keep calm and get your accreditation In the midst of coronavirus convolutions and COVID-19 threats (even the title is bifurcated) it may seem surprising that the lessons from accreditation by the IHBC can have such a special relevance in the current situation, for applicants as well as assessors. A recent confluence of circumstances was a reminder of just how well our approaches to conservation practice and accreditation map to the most practical of situations around risk and threat. In March, I visited Usk inWales to co-host a MATE session organised by a local conservation officer group. As our past president whisked me to the venue from Newport station, the post-flood (remember the floods?) landscape offered a salutary reminder of the need for community – and social – resilience in the face of crisis. That alone was a spur to many themes covered in the MATE session, around planning and preparedness, response and mitigation, as well as disaster recovery. As COVID-19 came into view in the following weeks, it brought with it all those now-too-familiar impacts on the daily lives of our volunteers and members; not least for the 2020 school host branch, including myself, as the pandemic threatened to drain all energy from over a year of intense planning, and development. Members’ responses to the diverse impacts of the sudden crisis highlighted the need for the very skills that we demand from our accredited members: understanding what the situation actually is, managing it as best we can, and only then determining on and implementing the most appropriate actions. For those who know the Practical Areas of Competence of Evaluation, Management and Intervention used in our model for accreditation, the IHBC’s Conservation Cycle, it is as simple and generic as that. Indeed, such a generic approach reflects best practice in any approach to threat management, from crisis mitigation to catastrophe recovery, as much as for conservation. For the Brighton 2020 School response to COVID- 19, all the associated skills needed to come into play, collectively, so that we could address our particular situation. As expected, volunteers and members were more than able to respond, both appropriately and imaginatively, and you will have already heard much more about our restructured response, and our first ‘virtual school’, by the time you read this. The parallels between conservation practice as a whole, and crisis control, first came to the fore for me when preparing for a European conference on Risk Reduction for Resilient Cities in 2016. I pitched the idea that conservation, both ultimately and fundamentally, operated mostly about managing threats to resources, or responding to crises or catastrophes. The approach was inspired first by my own postgraduate planning research into risk assessment models in development management, undertaken before I had even joined the IHBC. The 2016 conference presentation focused first on raising the international profile and understanding both of the IHBC and our unique brands of conservation and accreditation in an international forum. As such, it offered a distinctive take on crisis management as a romp through the Context archive, establishing a practice map for our own conservation history that ranged from threat recognition to disaster recovery, the more recent legacy of which included thinking highlighted in our 2019 Nottingham school. On further – and more recent – reflection: that our accreditation system’s reliance on risk models is perhaps inevitable given the adoption of higher-level, more generic, terms of assessment than usual. The models and processes that we apply in our testing of ‘conservation competence’ are rooted in generic good-practice approaches to any activities. In such contexts, risk and response always loom large, both at the most basic levels of nature and the highest: the risk of starving versus the risk of being eaten in the search for food, for example, or the risk of redundancy versus the efforts required to invest in the right skills. Our models, by extension, also reflect a huge breadth of application and operation, from the conservation-specific practice standards. ICOMOS, for example, defines conservation practice first as a learned set of skills. This approach helps us articulate conservation at its very core as a process that leads to outcomes, as opposed to more received polarisations of pickle or plunder. The most generic project management models from theWorld Bank lie at the other end of our spectrum of our accreditation models. There, environmental project management is articulated as methodological sequencing that ensures that threats in any development to recognised resources are appropriately regulated and mitigated.