Telašćica Nature Park from the air: Mir lake and the cliffs of Dugi otok

NiX

Advancing policy and practice of biodiversity conservation

About

NiX is an expert consultancy in nature conservation based in Zagreb, Croatia. We work with international organisations, governments, protected area authorities and civil society across Croatia, the Adriatic, the Mediterranean and South-East Europe — helping the nature conservation sector reach professional standards and mainstreaming biodiversity into the policies and practices that depend on it.

Behind NiX is Željka Rajković, MSc in Biology (Ecology) and MSc in Environmental Management (Imperial College London), with more than twenty years of work on protected areas. She is a member of the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA), the Conservation Standards Network Europe (CCNet Europe) and the IUCN Mediterranean Marine Expert Assessment Group for the Green List (EAGL).

What we do

We accompany a conservation initiative through its whole life cycle — from problem analysis and planning, through funding and implementation, to evaluation and the next planning round.

  • Protected area management planning

    Management plans, action plans and zoning plans for national parks, nature parks, Natura 2000 sites and marine protected areas — designed as participatory processes, not desk exercises. We also write the guidance others plan by: the Management Planning Guidelines for Protected Areas and/or Natura 2000 Sites in Croatia and the accompanying evaluation guides are used by the ministry and by public institutions nationwide.

  • Management effectiveness and the Green List

    Assessment of how well protected areas are actually managed, using METT, RAPPAM, the IUCN Green List standard — we sit on the IUCN Mediterranean Marine Expert Assessment Group — and the new IUCN WCPA global framework for assessing protected and conserved area effectiveness, at site, system and regional level, with a focus on measuring real conservation outcomes.

  • Conservation Standards and adaptive management

    Application of the Conservation Standards (CMP Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation) to projects, programmes and whole organisations: theories of change, results chains, monitoring frameworks and the discipline of learning from them.

  • Stakeholder engagement and facilitation

    Design and facilitation of workshops, working groups, stakeholder forums and conferences — Territorial Labs, World Café, Project in a Day, multi-stakeholder contracts. We are trained facilitators and facilitation trainers, and we co-design the process before we run it.

  • EU policy, nature restoration and funding

    Support to the implementation of EU nature conservation policy and legislation, including the Nature Restoration Regulation and National Nature Restoration Plans: policy and gap analysis, socio-economic assessment of restoration measures, monitoring frameworks, restoration finance. We prepare and manage project proposals for LIFE, Interreg, ERDF and other programmes — and we have led them as beneficiaries, not only written them.

  • Capacity building and organisational development

    Training and coaching for protected area staff, conservation practitioners and conservation CSOs: management planning, MPA management and sustainable financing, facilitation skills, communication and marketing, strategic and organisational development, monitoring and evaluation.

  • Marine and coastal conservation

    Marine protected areas, SPAMIs and the Barcelona Convention SPA/BD Protocol, coastal wetlands governance, coordination of national monitoring protocols for Posidonia oceanica beds and coralligenous communities, marine spatial and sustainable nautical tourism planning.

  • Sustainable tourism in protected areas

    Sustainable tourism plans and management strategies, market-based pricing strategies and benefit assessment for national and nature parks.

References

Clients and partners

International organisations and agencies

  • IUCN — International Union for Conservation of Nature (incl. the ECARO office and the WCPA Task Force on Conservation Effectiveness)
  • UNDP Croatia
  • UNEP-MAP Regional Activity Centre for Specially Protected Areas (SPA/RAC), Tunis
  • WWF Mediterranean Programme Office
  • ELMEN EEIG and the Institute of Landscape Ecology, Slovak Academy of Sciences
  • CCNet Europe e.V.
  • ProPark Foundation, Romania
  • Nature Returns, Portugal

Governments and public authorities

  • Croatian Ministry of Environmental Protection and Green Transition (previously Croatian Ministry of Culture / Croatian Ministry of Economy and Sustainable Development / Croatian Agency for the Environment and Nature)
  • City of Pula-Pola
  • Pula Herculanea Ltd.

Protected area institutions

  • Brijuni National Park
  • Telašćica Nature Park
  • Lastovo Islands Nature Park
  • Protected Areas of Dubrovnik-Neretva County
  • Protected Areas of Istria County – Natura Histrica
  • Public Company for National Parks of Montenegro

Protected areas our plans cover

  • Krka National Park
  • Dinara Nature Park
  • Biokovo Nature Park
  • Brijuni National Park
  • Telašćica Nature Park
  • Lastovo Islands Nature Park
  • the Cetina River Canyon
  • Ulcinj Salina Nature Park (ME)
  • Biogradska Gora, Skadar Lake, Prokletije and Lovćen national parks (ME)
  • Karaburun-Sazani national marine park (AL)
  • and the Natura 2000 sites associated with them

Civil society

  • Biom Association
  • Sunce — Association for Nature, Environment and Sustainable Development
  • WWF Adria

Contact

NiX — Željka Rajković
Medulićeva 1, HR-10000 Zagreb, Croatia
Phone
+385 92 2044 100
E-mail
[email protected]
Profiles
LinkedIn · ResearchGate
Working languages
Croatian, English, Spanish