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

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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.