Caveating Behavior Modification Approaches to Conservation

Reddy et al. (2016) provide a worthwhile discussion of some approaches to influencing human behavior for conservation. They categorize behavior change approaches in three ways: promoting awareness and concern, incentivizing behavior, and nudging behavior. Although these each reflect well-known relevant approaches, grouping norms, values, and other intrinsic elements within “incentivizing behavior” obfuscates a critical element of conservation initiatives that may more powerfully drive outcomes than any of the approaches suggested in the manuscript. That element is the quality of relationships between conservation practitioners and the various target audiences of their initiatives. Incentives make up only one part of these relationships. Any prescribed step-by-step process to conservation will inevitably be incomplete if not complemented with meaningful efforts in relationship building. This is particularly the case with larger scale, “wicked” conservation challenges, in which problems are difficult to define, desired outcomes may not be agreed upon (let alone strategies), and situations are likely to change fluidly, and sometimes dramatically, over time. In these cases, the prescribed steps of (1) defining a target audience and (2) target behavior(s), (3) understanding baseline behaviors, and even (4) understanding underlying motivations for those behaviors prior to (5) the design of an intervention to change them imply a more linear approach than is likely to be successful over time, even when effective monitoring (6) and feedbacks (7) are included. While these steps may be helpful, they are not sufficient to build enduring conservation strategies or behaviors likely to be resilient in a changing social, political, economic, and ecological environments. Conservation efforts are often stymied by issues of distrust between conservation practitioners and various relevant stakeholder groups, ranging from political groups to local people living in and around conservation areas. Trust issues have been demonstrated to overpower more seemingly rational concerns regarding incentives in multiple contexts (Stern 2008). Trust and distrust are based on a wider array of factors than incentives, emerging from dispositional, rational, affinitive, and systems-based antecedents (Stern & Coleman 2015). Participants in conservation challenges