The Metrics Trap
Why Arrests Are Not the Only Sign of Success in Conservation Intelligence
Numbers are reassuring. They fit neatly into reports, satisfy governance requirements, and communicate impact in a language that crosses cultural and professional boundaries. In conservation and counter-trafficking work, those numbers have tended to be arrests, seizures, and prosecutions. And for fifteen years or more, they have quietly been shaping the wrong incentives.
The metrics trap is one of the most persistent structural problems in the sector. It is not that arrests and seizures are unimportant. They are part of the criminal justice intervention that is sometimes, though not always, the right outcome. The problem is that when those metrics become the primary measure of success, organisations stop doing the harder, slower, less visible work that actually builds the intelligence architecture needed to disrupt serious and organised crime at scale.
How the Trap Sets Itself
Donors in the wildlife conservation space have, over the past decade and a half, been conditioned to equate success with headline outputs. That conditioning is not entirely their fault. NGOs themselves have reinforced it, posting regularly on social media about arrests made and seizures recorded, perpetuating a cycle in which visibility and impact become conflated.
“If that’s all you’re measuring, then you’ve incentivised the wrong things for NGOs. You end up with organisations chasing really quick enforcement wins, the low-hanging fruit, at the expense of the slow essential work of building intelligence networks.”
– Christian Plowman, Senior Advisor, Counter-Trafficking and Environmental Crime, NGO Intel
The consequence is an ecosystem in which the unglamorous, essential groundwork of intelligence development is systematically undervalued. Building a network of human sources, monitoring a trafficking corridor over eighteen months, developing the kind of deep organisational understanding that allows meaningful intervention: none of this produces a prosecution number. All of it is foundational to the work that eventually does.
Reframing Disruption as a Metric
The alternative is not to abandon measurement. It is to broaden what gets measured. Disruption, even without an arrest, is a legitimate and demonstrable outcome. A criminal network that has changed its operating methods because it knows it is being watched is a disrupted network. An online platform that has removed thousands of illegal wildlife trade listings because of an NGO’s flagging work has reduced the market available to traffickers. Neither outcome produces handcuffs. Both represent meaningful impact.
Disruption metrics are harder to communicate than arrest numbers, but they are not impossible to measure. Changes in trafficking patterns, shifts in network behaviour, reductions in platform activity, alterations in route or method: these are observable, documentable, and meaningful. They also feed back into the intelligence picture in ways that a single arrest often does not, because they reveal how networks adapt, which is precisely the information needed to stay ahead of them.
“Even if they don’t produce a prosecution number or a picture of somebody in handcuffs, it’s still something that’s measurable and tangible. And those sorts of outcomes are still feeding into the intelligence picture.”
– Christian Plowman
The Case for HUMINT as Infrastructure
Human intelligence, or HUMINT, sits at the sharp end of the metrics problem. Building a trusted network of sources takes years. It produces no immediate output. And it is extraordinarily difficult to explain to a donor who funded the work expecting something they can show to their own stakeholders.
The framing that has proved most effective is infrastructure investment rather than operational expenditure. When an organisation spends two years building a network of reliable human sources, it is not paying for information. It is paying for the operational capability to generate intelligence quickly when it matters, and it is acquiring something that cannot be built in the middle of a crisis.
The analogy holds: a police force that has not invested in source relationships before a crime occurs cannot build them after the fact. The investment has to precede the need. The same logic applies in the NGO intelligence world, and funders who understand this are beginning to fund accordingly.
Transparency Builds Confidence
One of the more counterintuitive lessons from the sector is that being transparent about the ethical and legal frameworks governing covert and intelligence activity, proportionality, legality, accountability, necessity, ethics, tends to build donor confidence rather than alarm donors about the nature of the work.
When funders understand that activities are subject to rigorous ethical and legal review before any resource is committed, they become more comfortable supporting work that does not produce immediate, tangible outputs. The absence of a prosecution number becomes easier to explain when the donor understands why the work that preceded it was both necessary and carefully governed.
The metrics trap will not be dismantled overnight. But the conversation is shifting, and the organisations leading that shift are those willing to make the case, clearly, patiently, and with evidence, for a broader definition of what success in this sector actually looks like.
NGO Intel is backed by Futurum Risk and delivers open-source intelligence, screening, and monitoring services to NGOs operating in South East Asia and Africa. Learn more at ngointelligence.com