Solving the participation puzzle: Understanding mechanisms behind causal effects of randomized controlled trials in conservation

这个项目调查了人们从事保护工作的动机。个人和家庭可能会对可能促进以保护为导向的行为的各种变量做出反应，包括经济激励和社会、文化、政治和制度因素。在一个群体中，个体可能会表现出与个性、价值观、身份和社会规范相关的额外变化。这项研究的重点是这些因素如何与物质回报相互作用，以塑造个人和家庭接受环境保护费用的意愿，这是美国和其他国家成本分担计划中普遍采用的一种方式。这项研究有助于研究人员了解人们如何看待这种支付以及谁参加了这种计划，这些信息可以为这些计划的设计和有效实施提供信息，以便更具包容性和更有效地促进环境保护。该项目还通过深度访谈和大规模实验相结合，有助于改进文化人类学家和其他学科的研究人员所使用的研究方法。通过组织开放式研讨会，研究人员可以在社会科学家和包括学生在内的其他受众中推广方法论方法。本研究旨在探索为什么那些被提供物质激励以促进环境保护的个人，无论是有条件地采取特定行为还是无条件地，可能同样有可能参与该计划。在环境社会科学家中，无条件激励通常被认为更具吸引力，特别是对被边缘化的人群，包括女性和较贫穷的家庭，他们通常面临更高的参与门槛和满足项目条件的更多困难。然而，与这些预期相反的是，先前的研究表明，薪酬的条件性可能并不能预测参与项目的情况。该项目使用人种学方法和文化共识分析来评估之前一项研究中这一意外发现背后的机制，该研究采用了随机对照试验。除了考虑来自不同学术学科的多个假设外，该项目还检验了一个新的假设，即关于信任、内在动机和公平感的文化规范在家庭参与保护项目的决定中发挥的作用比项目付款的条件性更显著。作为这一项目的一部分，正在进行的人种学工作有助于将先前的发现与背景联系起来，并在保护行为的跨学科研究中推进理论。这项工作的结果与政策制定者和其他管理自然资源的机构分享。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project examines the motivation for people to engage in conservation. Individuals and households potentially respond to a wide range of variables that can promote conservation-oriented behavior, including financial incentives and social, cultural, political, and institutional factors. Within a population, individuals may exhibit additional variation related to personalities, values, identities, and social norms. This research focuses on how these factors interact with material rewards to shape the willingness of individuals and households to accept payments for environmental conservation, an approach that is commonly employed in cost-share programs in the United States and other countries. This study helps researchers to understand how people perceive such payments and who enrolls in such programs, information that can inform the design and effective implementation of these programs to be more inclusive and effective at promoting environmental conservation. This project also contributes to improving research methods used by cultural anthropologists and researchers in other disciplines by combining in-depth interviews with a large-scale experiment. The organization of an open workshop allows the researchers to promote the methodological approach among social scientists and other audiences, including students.This research aims to explore why individuals who have been offered material incentives to promote environmental conservation, either conditional upon their adoption of specific behaviors or unconditionally, may be equally likely to participate in the program. Among environmental social scientists, unconditional incentives have conventionally been expected to be more appealing, particularly to marginalized populations, including women and poorer households, who commonly face higher barriers to participation and more difficulties to meet program conditions. In contrast to those expectations, however, prior research has shown that the conditionality of compensation may not be predictive of participation in programs. This project uses ethnographic methods and cultural consensus analysis to assess the mechanisms behind this unexpected finding from a previous study, which employed a randomized controlled trial. Alongside consideration of multiple hypotheses from diverse academic disciplines, this project also examines a new hypothesis that cultural norms about trust, intrinsic motivation, and perceptions of fairness play a more prominent role in households’ decisions to participate in conservation programs than the conditionality of the programs’ payments. The ethnographic work that is being conducted as part of this project helps to contextualize the prior findings and advance theory in the interdisciplinary study of conservation behavior. The results of this work are shared with policymakers and other institutions that manage natural resources.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.