Motivating landowners to recruit neighbors for private land conservation

Abstract

Encouraging motivated landowners to not only engage in conservation action on their own property but also to recruit others may enhance effectiveness of conservation on private lands. Landowners may only engage in such recruitment if they believe their neighbors care about the conservation issue, will positively respond to their conservation efforts, and are likely to take action for the conservation cause. We designed a series of microinterventions that can be added to community meetings to change these beliefs to encourage landowner engagement in recruitment of others. The microinterventions included neighbor discussion, public commitment making, collective goal setting, and increased observability of contributions to the conservation cause. In a field experiment, we tested whether adding microinterventions to traditional knowledge‐transfer outreach meetings changed those beliefs so as to encourage landowners in Hawaii to recruit their neighbors for private lands conservation. We delivered a traditional outreach meeting about managing the invasive little fire ant () to 5 communities and a traditional outreach approach with added microinterventions to 5 other communities. Analysis of pre‐ and post‐surveys of residents showed that compared with the traditional conservation outreach approach, the microinterventions altered a subset of beliefs that landowners had about others. These microinterventions motivated reputationally minded landowners to recruit and coordinate with other residents to control the invasive fire ant across property boundaries. Our results suggest integration of these microinterventions into existing outreach approaches will encourage some landowners to facilitate collective conservation action across property boundaries.

Factors that influence participation of Puerto Rican coffee farmers in conservation programs

“…Outreach efforts could address costs and profitability of shade farming, rather than only focusing on its environmental advantages. Perhaps, environmental agencies could recruit some of the shade coffee growers in the region to act as model landowners (Niemiec, Willer, Ardoin, & Brewer, ) who could demonstrate to fellow farmers the functionality of shade coffee system.…”

The challenges of long‐term invasive mammal management: lessons from the UK

“…Landowner support is crucial to a landscape‐scale approach to invasive mammal management, but in some places, access to land can be a barrier to ensuring comprehensive coverage. Lack of landowner commitment may be due to other priorities or limited resources or because of conflicting views or the fear of public opposition to controversial management of charismatic species (Niemiec et al ). Where landowners are supportive of the management objectives of invasive species control, access requests to trap or shoot can be refused on the grounds of health and safety concerns or insurance requirements.…”

Effects of Multiple Behavioral Drivers on Collective Conservation Outcomes

“…To represent how environmental changes resulting from individual actions feed back to influence future environmental decisions, we include a fourth driver, (iv) ecological feedback. Drivers i-iii were derived from the survey results (see Materials and Methods) whereas driver iv was added after the survey was conducted, inspired by the suggestion that when behavior is easily observable, social norms could contribute to widespread change in behavior (37) (see also [38]).…”

“…Establishing such "seeds" of conservation could trigger willingness to adopt pro-environmental behavior(s), especially if "seed" land owners commit to long-term conservation via mechanisms such as covenants. A process of land owners encouraging neighbors to undertake private land conservation integrates both ecological feedbacks and social network influence, and this intervention has recently been tested with successful outcomes for landscape-level conservation (38).…”