The Impact of Training on Druze Entrepreneurs’ Attitudes Towards and Intended Behaviors Regarding Local Sustainability Governance: A Field Experiment at the Mount Carmel Biosphere Reserve

Abstract

This article expands our understanding of biosphere reserve management by exploring the effect of green business-guidance training. Biosphere reserves promote conservation while enabling sustainable use by local communities, in keeping with the notion of local sustainability governance. In practice, however, many local communities regard biosphere reserves as an obstacle to their economic growth and prosperity, resulting in active resistance to them. Given this complexity, we ask whether green business-guidance training changes entrepreneurs’ attitudes towards and intended behaviors regarding local sustainability governance. To test this question empirically, we used action research and designed a before-and-after field experiment in the Mount Carmel Biosphere Reserve in Israel. Our findings suggest that green business-guidance training has a significant positive effect on entrepreneurs’ attitudes towards and intended behaviors regarding local sustainability governance and that biosphere reserve managements can improve local sustainability governance performance via training. We discuss our findings and suggest new paths for research in theory and practice.

Network of Landscapes in the Sustainable Management of Transboundary Biosphere Reserves

“…The declaration of a territory as a TBR can be a factor that favors certain ventures, particularly those related to rural tourism. However, the concern of the managers of TBRs should lie in favoring the conditions of community ventures so as to promote ecological business learning and the intergenerational continuity of activities based on real sustainable development [81].…”

Cooperation and Environmental Responsibility as Positive Factors for Entrepreneurial Resilience

“…This cluster on Figure 6 focuses more on the management [17,20,26,28,68,[73][74][75] of this kind of enterprise [75]. Following the previously cited stakeholder theory [7,58,76], these kinds of organizations pursue an entrepreneurial strategy to consider the wider social impact [49,58,70,75,77,78], thereby reinforcing entrepreneurial resilience through stronger community approval (Entrepreneurship with link strength = 16 and occurrence = 10; Social Impact with link strength = 11 and occurrence = 7), which would help it to survive in a crisis. Knowledge with link strength = 9 and occurrence = 7) into a mindful entrepreneurial strategy [34,[79][80][81][82][83][84].…”