Factors influencing farmers’ participation in contractual biodiversity conservation: a choice experiment with northern Australian pastoralists

Abstract

Private landholders’ contributions to biodiversity conservation are critical in landscapes with insufficient formal conservation reserves, as is the case in Australia's tropical savannas. This study reports results from a discrete choice experiment conducted with pastoralists and graziers across northern Australia. The experiment was designed to explore the willingness of pastoralists and graziers to sign up to voluntary biodiversity conservation contracts. Understanding preferences for contractual attributes and preference heterogeneity were additional objectives. Such knowledge can increase effectiveness and efficiency of conservation programs by informing contract design, negotiation and administration. Random parameter logit modelling showed that of contract attributes, conservation requirement, stewardship payment, contract duration and flexibility in contract conditions significantly influenced choices. Land productivity was a significant factor as were attitudes. There was significant heterogeneity of preferences for all contract attributes. Models were run for best–worst scaling responses and the first preferences subset, with the latter model deemed superior. Latent class modelling distinguished four classes of decision‐makers and illustrated different decision heuristics. Conservation investment strategies, which offer farmers contract options that meet biodiversity requirements while accommodating heterogeneous attribute preferences, are likely to lead to increased participation rates. Complementary suasion efforts are also required which espouse the benefits that pastoralists derive from biodiversity and participation in voluntary conservation contracts.

Willingness to pay for ecosystem services provided by irrigated agriculture in Northeast Thailand

“…The negative sign was not expected and suggests a 'negative' bias toward the SQ, that is, a positive perception of changes. This is in contrast to other studies that have found positive bias toward SQ (Kenter et al 2011;Greiner 2015). One possible explanation for this negative bias for SQ is that, with the help of additional questions to clarify why respondents chose SQ, we have been able to screen out more protesters than other study.…”

Motivations and attitudes influence farmers' willingness to participate in biodiversity conservation contracts

“…This was expected as the model did not include any business and social variables so as not to confuse the focus of this analysis on attitudinal and motivational influences. The influence of other factors is analysed elsewhere (Greiner, 2015).…”

“…Respondents were asked to pick their preferred option ('1st preference') and subsequently indicate the least preferred then second preferred option in any given choice task. Table 3 provides an example of one discrete choice task with the 1st preference question only as the analysis shown here is restricted to the sub-set of 1st preference data, which has been shown to yield superior model results compared to the fully ranked data (Greiner, 2015).…”

“…Typically, ordinal scale responses to single attitude questions are chosen as psychological variables, as has been done in earlier analysis of this survey data (Greiner, 2015) to illustrate attitudinal influences on choice. However, a more systematic elicitation of psychological factors and elicitation of factors is preferable, which increases validity, reliability and precision of concept estimation (De Vaus, 2002;Francis et al, 2004).…”

“…Panels were unbalanced because some respondents did not complete all six choice tasks and respondents who participated in the pre-test and completed 12 choice tasks were included in the full sample. The analysis was done on the 1st preference data, which have been shown to yield superior models compared to the fully ranked choice data (Greiner, 2015). Missing covariate values were mean substituted to retain all choice observation in the analysis.…”