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

这个项目研究了人们参与保护的动机。个人和家庭可能会对各种各样的变量做出反应，这些变量可以促进以保护为导向的行为，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、身份和社会规范有关的其他变化。本研究的重点是这些因素如何与物质奖励相互作用，以塑造个人和家庭接受环境保护费用的意愿，这是一种在美国和其他国家的成本分摊计划中常用的方法。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些计划，这些信息可以告知这些计划的设计和有效实施，以更具包容性和有效促进环境保护。该项目还通过将深入访谈与大规模实验相结合，有助于改进文化人类学家和其他学科研究人员使用的研究方法。通过举办公开研讨会，研究人员可以在社会科学家和其他受众（包括学生）中推广该方法论。本研究旨在探讨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，都有可能参与该计划。在环境社会科学家中，无条件激励通常被认为更具吸引力，特别是对边缘化人群，包括妇女和贫困家庭，他们通常面临更高的参与障碍和更多的困难来满足计划条件。然而，与这些期望相反，先前的研究表明，补偿的条件性可能无法预测参与计划。该项目使用人种学方法和文化共识分析来评估先前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科的多个假设外，该项目还研究了一个新的假设，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计划的决定中发挥了比计划支付条件更重要的作用。作为该项目的一部分，正在进行的民族志工作有助于将先前的发现和保护行为的跨学科研究中的先进理论结合起来。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.