About Us

• What is the role of place-based ENGOs in environmental governance as drivers of durable impact and transformational change?
• What models and tools do ENGOs commonly use to understand and communicate impact and what are their limitations? What innovative approaches exist to capture hard-to-measure social and ecological impacts and value?
• What are the enabling conditions related to environmental governance, organizational governance, and organizational practices that contribute to a place-based ENGO’s impact?

We employ a mixed methods case-study research design focused on place-based ENGOs working in varied geographical and social contexts across the United States. Our methodology is grounded in an applied, participatory approach, advancing a bi-directional exchange between practice and theory. In this approach, knowledge is co-produced by ENGOs, community members with practical knowledge, technical experts, and academic researchers at the Success Lab.

Following the lineage of participatory research, collaboration includes co-defining the research problem, identifying data-collection processes, reflecting on data interpretation, and co-developing research outputs. As such, our research advances through iterative cycles of collaboration with our case-study ENGOs and their collaborators. This approach centers local knowledge, builds on and supports the experiences of practitioners, and ensures our research findings are context-sensitive, action-oriented and grounded in applied settings.

Our methods include:

• Participant observation of organizational practices through site visits
• In-depth stakeholder interviews
• Document analysis
• Stakeholder network analysis
• Focus group discussions

Our pilot case-studies focus on ENGOs with demonstrated records of social and environmental impact and a commitment to collaborative practice. Through participatory, in-depth, exploratory research we examine organizational practices, governance conditions, and contextual factors that enable or constrain their capacity to drive environmental and social change.

Our research into the impact of ENGOs applies a multi-scaled analysis by tracing what political ecologists refer to as “webs of relations” and “chains of analysis”. We work across six interconnected areas of inquiry that connect organizational practices and impact to broader social-ecological transformations over time and across scales.

1. Organizational practices

We begin at the organizational level, focusing on specific ENGO practices that enable (or constrain) the ability of an organization to achieve their goals, demonstrate value, and drive transformative socio-ecological change. We examine how strategies and daily practices are shaped by knowledge and power dynamics, whose knowledge counts, and how knowledge is produced.  This includes attention to practices that strengthen social relationships (relational practices), frame environmental challenges and appropriate solutions (framing practices), and reveal the balance between managerial and democratic organizational logics.

2. Place-based context

We then situate organizational practices within the broader cultural, and political-economic setting in which organizations operate. This includes exploring how environments both shape and are shaped by place-based cultural relationships with nature, local practices and histories, knowledge systems, and power. This wider gaze allows us to better understand the role of distinctive and often idiosyncratic place-based conditions in shaping ENGO practices. Understanding this relationship as bi-directional, we also explore how ENGOs understand, engage strategically, and seek to enable changes in their wider context.

3. Historical Perspective

To capture change over time, not just a static image of organizational impact, we take an historical perspective. Through this lens we probe both the arc of socio-ecological change and the role an ENGOs plays in driving change. In order to understand an organization’s durability, resilience, and community legitimacy we identify key points of organizational evolution and their relationship to broader socio-political or ecological drivers and local challenges.

4. Policy and Governance Landscape

We situate the ENGO’s impact within the broader policy landscape of environmental governance. At this scale we explore the role an organization can play in shaping norms and structures that guide contemporary environmental management. This inquiry highlights how organizations navigate, respond to, and at times seek to influence structural conditions such as property regimes, regulatory frameworks, and market dynamics, in order to achieve socio-ecological change.

5. Environmental Discourse

We analyze a discursive dimension into how environmental problems are framed and understood. This includes inquiry into how environmental issues are shaped by cultural values and power relations that define what is prioritized, what is contested, what remains invisible, and the range of possible interventions that are set. Our research follows how ENGOs both shape and are shaped by environmental discourse.

6. Framing Impact

We interrogate how impact is understood, measured and represented asking what impact indicators are used and how they frame the ways in which change is perceived, valued, and pursued. We explore ways to communicate some of the transformative impacts organizations drive such as those related to social processes, governance and relational outcomes, and long-term dynamics that underpin socio-ecological transformation.

Place-based environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) are community-rooted institutions that focus on the environmental challenges and opportunities of a specific geographic area — a watershed, a city, a working landscape. They draw on local knowledge, long-term relationships, and cross-sector collaboration to develop strategies tailored to the social and ecological realities of the landscapes and communities they serve. Unlike organizations that operate at national or global scales, place-based ENGOs often derive their legitimacy and effectiveness from sustained presence, deep community engagement, and responsiveness to local priorities. 

Why It Matters 

Place-based ENGOs are the Success Lab’s unit of analysis. We use the term to do more than describe the scale at which these organizations operate: emphasizing that ENGOs are “place-based” underscores that they are embedded within the local social and environmental context in which they work. Their strategies, relationships, and accountability structures are shaped by, and in turn shape, the specific landscapes and communities they serve. Yet place-based ENGOs remain under-described in the scholarly literature relative to the outsized role they play in environmental governance. This gap is not merely a theoretical concern. The implications are wide-ranging, from the way we train environmental practitioners to lead through civil society organizations, to the capacity of practitioners to critically assess the root causes of organizational successes and failures, to our ability to measure the larger impacts of ENGO work associated with transformative change in socio-ecological outcomes. The Lab studies these organizations as critical actors in multi-level governance systems, asking how they become effective, how they sustain that effectiveness over time, and what enables their contributions to travel beyond the specific places where they work.  

For practitioners, a clearer understanding of what makes place-based ENGOs effective has immediate strategic value. These organizations are increasingly relied upon by governments, funders, and international institutions to implement conservation and development agendas, even as they face shrinking budgets, shifting donor priorities, and growing political complexity. Without frameworks that capture how place-based ENGOs shape governance, build community capacity, and sustain impact over time, the field risks inadvertently undermining effective practice at precisely the moment these organizations are most needed. While our research findings emerge from a focus on the practices and impact of place-based ENGOs, many of our findings and frameworks are relevant for NGOs and actors relying on and collaborating with them at all scales. 

Environmental governance refers to the processes, rules, practices, and institutions, both formal and informal, through which societies make decisions about managing the environment and natural resources. It is broader than government. Where government refers to the structures of the state, governance encompasses the full web of decision-making that includes government actors alongside businesses, NGOs, communities, and civil society. Governance can be centralized (authority held solely in centralized institutions), decentralized (authority distributed across local institutions), polycentric (multiple overlapping centers of decision-making with no single ultimate authority), or hybrid (blending state, market, and community-based approaches). 

Why It Matters 

Environmental governance is a lens through which the Lab examines how place-based ENGOs operate and why their work matters. A governance lens draws attention to how ENGOs shape (and are shaped by) the rules, norms, and relationships that determine how environmental decisions get made in a landscape. The Lab asks how ENGOs participate in governance from below, providing data from on-the-ground monitoring, influencing policy dialogues, facilitating collaboration between communities and decision-makers including government agencies and policymakers, and opening space for civil society to advocate for environmental futures.  

Understanding governance matters for practitioners because an organization’s impact cannot be separated from the governance context in which it operates. ENGOs do not work in a vacuum, their effectiveness depends on the institutional arrangements, political dynamics, and stakeholder relationships that surround them. Practitioners who understand their governance role can make better strategic decisions about where to invest resources, how to build coalitions, and how to position their organizations within complex multi-actor landscapes. Impact measurement frameworks that ignore governance context risk misrepresenting what organizations actually contribute, and what it takes to sustain those contributions over time. 

Transformative change refers to fundamental shifts in the structures, norms, and systems that shape how societies organize themselves and relate to the world around them, not incremental adjustments within existing systems but system-wide reorganization across multiple scales and levels. The concept is emergent within the broader field of sustainability transformations, which examines how societies can shift toward more resilient and equitable socio-ecological futures. Scholars (Scoones et al. 2020) identify three interconnected approaches an NGO can take to drive transformative change to sustainability. Systemic approaches seek to change parts of a system through leverage points, feedback loops, and system redesign, drawing on systems thinking to identify interdependencies among institutions, technologies, and networks that can be influenced to achieve wider impact. Structural approaches refer to fundamental changes to knowledge and power paradigms aimed at shifting political-economic conditions and cultural forces, changes to deeply held beliefs and assumptions that influence norms and priorities, reflecting shifts in how we relate to each other and the natural world. Enabling approaches focus on empowering individuals and communities to direct transformation on their own behalf, changing values and increasing access to information, resources, and decision-making so that people can manage uncertainty, act collectively, and identify pathways to desired futures. 

Why It Matters 

Transformative change is the type of impact the Success Lab is designed to understand. Many place-based ENGOs are engaged in transformative work, building coalitions, shifting community norms around environmental stewardship, and creating institutional arrangements that endure beyond any single program. While ENGO impact is often framed in terms of quantifiable programmatic outputs, conceiving of their role in driving transformative change emphasizes the long-term, structural social and ecological contributions they are making. Rather than counting programmatic outputs, we ask how ENGOs drive transformative change by contributing to deeper reconfigurations of governance arrangements, social norms, and knowledge systems that shape socio-ecological outcomes. 

For practitioners, understanding a framework for approaches to transformative change can strengthen organizational practices and provide language to articulate the goals and impacts of work organizations may already be doing. These distinctions give practitioners a vocabulary for describing, and strategically pursuing, the kinds of change that matter most in their landscapes. Understanding, measuring, and communicating an ENGO’s impact in terms of transformative change can bring visibility and value to the long-term, relationship-based practices and societal roles that are rooted in an organization’s identity beyond a single program or project cycle.  

Organizational practices are the everyday routines, decision-making processes, and relational behaviors through which ENGOs pursue their missions, carry out their programs, and engage with the communities they serve. Scholars identify two institutional logics that shape day-to-day practices and how nonprofits organize: a managerial logic oriented toward efficiency, performance measurement, and accountability to funders; and a democratic logic oriented toward participation, deliberation, civic skill-building, and accountability to members and communities. These logics are not mutually exclusive, recent research demonstrates they can be combined in different degrees, but they exist in productive tension, and the balance between them shapes what kind of organization an ENGO becomes and what kinds of contributions it makes to society. 

Why It Matters 

The Success Lab focuses on organizational practices as an important lens through which we examine how ENGOs generate, or fail to generate, durable social and environmental change. Within this framework, we are particularly drawn to two categories of practice within the democratic logic. Relational practices are the interpersonal work of building trust, cultivating cultural competency, maintaining sustained engagement across lines of difference, and constructing participants as active citizens rather than passive clients. Framing practices are the communicative work of defining problems, constructing shared narratives, and shaping what a community considers possible, necessary, or worth pursuing. Together, relational and framing practices represent two mechanisms through which ENGOs can function as what scholars call “schools of democracy”, organizations that not only deliver services but cultivate citizens capable of participating in collective governance. Our case studies examine how ENGOs navigate the tension between managerial and democratic logics in practice, and how specific combinations of relational and framing practices shape their contributions to environmental governance and social outcomes. 

For practitioners, understanding the distinction between managerial and democratic logics offers a framework for reflecting on organizational practices, strategy, and impact.