Assessing intervention effectiveness at promoting voluntary conservation practice adoption in agrienvironments

Abstract

Although implementing conservation practices on private farms and forests can produce substantial environmental benefits, these practices are not being adopted widely enough to result in measurable improvements at regional scales. Researchers have investigated the production and program factors influencing producer choices to voluntarily adopt these practices. However, the findings of reviews are inconsistent, raising questions about review methods, including the omission of relevant variables. Further, applying lessons from past work to promote adoption is difficult because many reviews investigated dispositional or demographic variables that practitioners and policy makers cannot directly observe or influence. We conducted a new review of 146 empirical studies that tested the effects of different interventions (e.g., financial incentives, outreach events, and nudges) on increasing the likelihood of producers adopting conservation practices. We conducted a metaregression of quantitative studies from diverse disciplines that filtered studies by quality (i.e., use of randomization and clear analysis reporting). We synthesized these results with a thematic analysis of qualitative studies on producer perspectives about conservation practices. Financial incentives had the strongest evidence of increasing producers’ likelihood of adopting conservation practices (odds ratio 1.86, p < 0.05). However, this effect was only apparent after filtering by study quality, which also improved model fit and identified significant regional differences (odds ratio –1.69, p < 0.01). The thematic review of qualitative studies revealed that peer groups may be successful in reinforcing adoption behaviors due to homophily effects and that financial incentives not only offset implementation costs but also mitigated perceived risks of adoption. Given the problems we encountered in testing hypotheses about the magnitude of variability explained by intervention types and practice characteristics, we recommend additional experimental and longitudinal work that accounts for financial incentives and pairs qualitative and quantitative data to clarify relationships between program design and practice adoption rates.

Achieving transformational change through the consilience of behavioral science and radical alternatives

“…We also identified two limitations facing radical transformations that could be addressed through further collaboration with behavioral science: (1) a lack of empirical evidence suggesting that proposed alternatives could resolve contemporary socio-ecological problems and (2) little attention to the strategies and processes through which transformations could come to replace capitalism. This second critique could be partly addressed through collaboration with behavioral scientists given their expertise in precisely measuring the effects of different interventions (Read and Wainger 2023;Thomas-Walters et al 2023). This expertise is independent of whether the intervention was based on behavioral theory and of who constitutes the target audience.…”