An investigation of socio-psychological determinants of private landowner participation in voluntary conservation programs

Background/Question/Methods

Voluntary programs are increasingly used to promote biodiversity conservation by private landowners. Such programs may use non-monetary incentives or monetary incentives well below market-value to engage private landowners.  Because financial considerations play such a small role in such programs, rational economic theory is ill-suited to guide and evaluate them.  On the other hand, there is a well established tradition within environmental social science relating to pro-environmental motivations and behaviors.  Such approaches are diverse, drawing upon alternative assumptions on the roles of social and psychological determinants to pro-environmental behavior involving values, attitudes, norms, socio-demographics and experiential factors.  While beneficial on an individual level for explaining behaviors the relationship between the alternative approaches is less understood.  The current research examines several established social psychological models, the Theory of Planned Behavior, Norm Activation, Connectiveness to Nature and the New Ecological Paradigm, in relation to participation by landowners in two voluntary conservation land management programs sponsored by the Ministry of Natural Resources, Ontario, Canada.  The findings are based upon a mail survey of 1,200 eligible landowners eliciting extensive information on their properties as well as the roles of experience and motivation in leading them to participate, or not, in these programs.

Results/Conclusions

Results are preliminary but suggest an hierarchical, causal relationship between personal background factors and social psychological determinants.  Landowners who participate in either of these programs do receive a modest financial return in the form of a land tax rebate.  Not surprisingly the degree of economic motivation increases with the square acreage of eligible lands.  For the majority of participants, however, the level of financial return is small and in these cases personal background factors and experience with nature, especially at an early age, appear related to the willingness to practice conservation on their private lands.  Non-participation can be linked to the lack of financial incentives along with skepticism over the value of government-sponsored programs, denial of negative environmental consequences due to non-involvement, less sense of responsibility to undertake environmental stewardship and a relatively weak sense of obligation based on the perceived expectations of friends and neighbors.  Overall, the conclusion from the analysis is that social psychological determinants of biodiversity conservation should be considered in the context of voluntary and relatively non-market based planning, but other background factors, especially related to past experience, fuel these cognitive states.