There has been quite a considerable amount of debate over the last decade about the importance of quality assessment in the field of LTC provision in Portugal, framed by the discourse on social investment. In a context of limited resources, care providers are pressured to demonstrate creation of value. Quality assessment becomes one of the paths to demonstrate worthiness. This, however, has not translated into standardised protocols of evaluation of impacts and quality in particular. The question has been asked why is that? In this article we contribute to answering this question by looking at the discourses of stakeholders on the topic of social investment and quality in LTC. Overall there is a discourse that acknowledges the importance of assessing investments and quality as a reliable proxy to measure return on investments, although there is a general difficulty in translating social investment and the quest for quality into specific examples and tools.

Biodiversity conservation is increasingly expected to reduce poverty where the two coincide. Yet conservation and poverty are multifaceted concepts and the linkages between them are complex and variable; whether and how conservation contributes to poverty reduction in practice will depend on the specific nature of those linkages. To unravel this complexity we explored the portfolio of Fauna & Flora International, an international conservation organization operating in some of the poorest countries and regions. We examined reports from 88 projects and categorized the rationales, approaches and outcomes of a sample of 34 livelihoods-focused projects. Rationales varied among and within projects and included apparent ‘win-win’ scenarios (reducing poverty improves conservation outcomes), trade-offs (conservation action hurts the poor or poverty reduction damages biodiversity), and situations where livelihoods interventions were not directly linked to conservation gains. Projects revealed a balance of direct (income, food security, health) and indirect (capacity building, reduced vulnerability, governance, empowerment) livelihood goals. Overall, empowerment, security and social network development were more significant short-term outcomes than income generation. Social responsibility was widely embedded but does not necessarily translate into a positive impact on poverty. Conservation organizations have the potential to improve the lives of the poor in many places where they operate, and arguably a duty to ensure that conservation does not make poor people worse off. Yet it is important to be clear about the reasons for engaging and the scope and scale of likely outcomes.

The debate about poverty and conservation draws mainly on local case studies, particularly of the impacts of protected areas. Although it is clear that local and contingent variables have important effects on the social and economic impacts of protected area establishment, it is not known whether there is a general relationship between national wealth and the area, number and type of protected area designated. Here we conduct such an analysis. Our results suggest that wealthy countries have a larger number of protected areas of smaller size than poorer countries. However, we find few significant relationships between indicators of poverty and the extent of protected areas at a national scale. Our analysis therefore confirms that relationships between poverty and conservation action are dynamic and locally specific. This conclusion has implications for opposing positions within the debate on poverty and conservation. Critics of conservation who build upon local case studies to argue that protected areas make a significant contribution to poverty risk exaggerating the scale of the problem. However, conservation advocates also need to temper their enthusiasm. Outcomes in which both poverty alleviation and conservation goals are achieved may be possible in specific circumstances but clear choices will often need to be made between conservation and livelihood goals.