III . Understanding Behaviors: Assessment and Research

Background

In the previous chapter we presented a model of the process of understanding and influencing conservation behavior. We did so to meet a need identified by our desk research, interviews, and field work. That work also identified another problem: we found that quite often the first, indispensable step of the process - developing some understanding of why people do what they do - was the weakest. We found that activities designed to influence conservation and natural resources management behaviors are often based on untested, and sometimes erroneous, assumptions made by their planners and implementers. Assumptions about what motivates behaviors, or whether those behaviors are sustainable, are not often checked through social assessment, especially of a kind that involves real participation in the process by the actors themselves.

Too often conservation projects have charged ahead, implementing activities without enough assessment and research to understand what is really going on. Not surprisingly, such projects often run into problems later. Because the rest of the process depends on understanding what is really going on, this report, and our analysis as a whole, focuses mainly on this essential first stage. The assessment and research stage of the process outlined in the previous chapter leads toward an understanding of critical conserva-tion behaviors and the social and ecological context in which they occur.

We have divided the assessment stage of the process into three steps: (1) assessing the situation, (2) identifying critical behaviors, and (3) understanding key factors that influence critical behaviors (Fig. 5). These steps correspond roughly to the top three levels of the conceptual hierarchy shown in Figure 4: assessing the situation involves a broad investigation of so-cial and ecological conditions; identifying critical behaviors focuses at the level of behaviors; and understanding key factors moves down to the factors level of the hierarchy.

Figure 5. Steps of the Assessment and Research Stage of a Process for Understanding Conservation Behaviors

Assessing The Situation

The goal of this step is to identify decisions, practices, and actions involved in people’s interaction with their environment and develop an understanding of the social and ecological context of those behaviors. A broad view of social and ecological conditions is taken at this step. Questions to ask about the conservation and natural resources management situation include the following:

What?: What are people doing that affects the environment? How are they using it (in a broad sense of the word “use,” including nonmaterial and indirect material uses - see Introduction, Table 1). What actions, practices, decisions, and behaviors affect natural resources in this specific situation? Which of these behaviors contribute to depletion or degradation of resources important to one or more groups of actors, stakeholders, or users and are therefore seen as problems by them? Which represent opportu-nities for one or more groups?

This initial step is sometimes called problem assessment, problem identification, needs assessment, or problem definition. Conservation and natural resources management problems - apparently unsustainable situations - are often what attract the attention of agencies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and donors to a given location in the first place. Looking at this step in a positive, rather than a negative, way, however, it could be treated as opportunities assessment. The goal would be to find the sustainable behaviors people are already using and support and enhance those behaviors - to look for what is right rather than what is wrong.

Who?: Identify actors at all levels and understand the heterogeneity present in the community with regard to natural resource management practices (other approximately equivalent terms now in use: stakeholder identification or analysis, identification of user groups).

Where?: Understand the spatial distribution of behaviors that affect natural resources.

When?: Understand the temporal distribution of behaviors that affect natural resources.

Trends?: Understand long-term trends related to the sustainability of decisions, practices, and actions. Are they leading toward depletion or degradation, stability, or increase in a given resource?

Identifying Critical Behaviors

After a general understanding of the social and ecological conditions has been developed, the next step is to refine and focus that understanding by identifying critical behaviors to target for maintenance or change. The goal of this step is to identify the critical behaviors of relevant actors (including individuals and organizations or groups at the local, national, and international level) - those behaviors that have the largest impact on ecological sustainability. Questions to ask include the following: What are people doing here that is ecologically sound and sustainable? What are they doing that is unsustainable, leading to the depletion or degradation of biodiversity and other natural resources? Which behaviors are the biggest threat or problem? Which have the most potential to provide for human well-being in a sustainable fashion?

Examples from the field illustrate the wide range of behaviors practitioners are concerned with.

In Madagascar, for example, practitioners carrying out integrated conservation and development projects would like local communities to maintain a number of behaviors, including the following:

They would like to change the following behaviors of local people:

At Lake Nakuru, in Kenya, an integrated conservation and development project supported by Overseas Development Administration of the British Government and the European Union, and managed by WWF-International, is working with local communities surrounding Lake Nakuru National Park. Project staff would like local people to maintain the following behaviors:

Project staff would like to change a number of behaviors, including the following:

At Kasungu National Park in Malawi, staff of the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Management would like local people to continue these practices:

They would like people to stop these practices:

“Good” and “Bad” Behaviors?

The examples given above are behaviors that conservationists and natural resource managers would like to change or maintain. But sometimes different natural resources stakeholders have different views of what behaviors are important or critical to change or maintain - which are “good” and which are “bad.” How do we decide which behaviors should be changed, and which should be maintained? Who should define good and bad behavior?

Different views about which behaviors are critical to change or maintain can be found among the stakeholders in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA), for example. The NCA is a multiple-use area adjacent to Serengeti National Park in northern Tanzania. The area is supposed to be managed for the benefit of resident Maasai pastoralists and wildlife; it attracts large numbers of foreign tourists, who come to see the wildlife, scenery, and colorful resident Maasai. Some local Maasai leaders in the NCA would like government staff to:

Government staff of the NCA would like resident Maasai to:

For conservation and sustainable natural resources management, ecological and social sustainability must be a key criterion for defining good and bad behavior. Because it is future use or option value that underpins the concept of sustainability, good and bad in this context refers mainly to whether the behavior keeps natural-resource-use options open for the future or closes them because of extinction, resource depletion and degradation, and other kinds of irreversible environmental changes.

What behaviors are ecologically and socially sustainable? An answer to that question is fundamental to deciding which behaviors should be changed and which maintained, but it is not always easy to answer. Understanding sustainability requires both ecological and social knowledge, and our knowledge of both ecosystems and social systems is imperfect and incomplete. Research and monitoring may be needed to determine whether or not a given practice is sustainable. Such research and monitoring may require trained social scientists and ecologists, but often a basic understanding of sustainability can be developed in a participatory way with rural people, by looking at social and ecological trends (see Figs. 6, 15, and 16, for examples).

Local people often have sophisticated indigenous knowledge of their natural resources and how to manage them, knowledge that, when investigated, often proves to be quite ecologically sound and scientific. On the other hand, outsiders’ views of what behaviors are sustainable are sometimes naive and misinformed. For example, local people in Senegal lop off the branches of live trees and use them as fodder or to dress their fields. This practice is illegal, yet local people know from long experience that it is sustainable. Lopping branches does not kill the tree, but stimulates new growth if done properly. The practice conserves grass and grazing land; it protects soil from erosion and helps maintain soil fertility. According to Karen S. Freudenberger, a rapid rural appraisal specialist, “Often, local peoples’ knowledge of and interaction with their local environment are more sophisticated and environmentally sound than outsiders’. Villagers may engage in illegal (presumably bad) behaviors (e.g., lopping tree branches in the Sahel) that are actually more ecologically sound than the behaviors mandated by the law.”

Why Focus on Critical Behaviors?

Judith Graeff and co-authors (Graeff, Elder, and Booth, 1993) suggest that to narrow the field of potentially relevant behaviors to a few critical behaviors to target, practitioners and their community partners should consider:

In the health sector, they explain, “There are several reasons why communicators should establish a short list of behaviors to promote. First, behaviors related to desired health practices are frequently too numerous and complex to introduce, change, and maintain all at one time. Second, some behaviors are more easily changed than others; some behaviors are simply not feasible for the target audience to perform, and others are incompatible with social and cultural norms. Third, some behaviors have more potential impact on the health problem” (Graeff, Elder, and Booth, 1993).

It should be mentioned here that we have looked to the health sector for models and lessons because a great deal of work has been done on understanding and influencing health-related behaviors. However, we should point out that the kinds of behaviors important in the health sector may be somewhat different from the behaviors relevant to natural resources management. Some possible differences involve the following:

Because of such differences, models and lessons from the health sector may require modification and adaptation for use in conservation and natural resources management. Focusing on critical behaviors can be thought of as “playing the elimination game” (Graeff, Elder, and Booth, 1993) or visualized as using a series of sieves to screen rocks out of dirt. Of all behaviors that influence natural resources and conservation, the ones with the largest positive or negative impact can be identified. Those can then be screened on the basis of how feasible it is to change or maintain them, and the most easily influenced selected. Considering whether the ideal behavior, or something like it, is already being practiced in the community has an important bearing on how feasible it may be to influence it. Mata (1992) discusses a similar methodology for selecting behaviors to target.

One complication in this process arises because for some behaviors, such as building terraces to conserve soil, the problem might be solved if 75 percent of farmers build terraces. For other behaviors, like rhino poaching, a very small number of poachers can decimate the resource even if almost everyone else supports rhino protection.

Another complication is that some behaviors may be very important because of their impact on the sustainability of a resource, but also very resistant to change. Others may be relatively easy to influence but not very important because their impact on the resource is not great. In choosing which behaviors to target, practitioners must make pragmatic judgments about how to weigh those factors. Lack of knowledge can complicate such judgments. It may not always be clear which of several behaviors is more important to sustaining the natural resource base in the long term, or which behaviors are more easily influenced. More ecological or social assessment and research may help to answer such questions, but uncertainty can never be eliminated completely. For example, at Lake Nakuru no studies of the effect of untreated sewage or sediment from soil erosion on the lake ecosystem have been carried out, so no one really knows how serious a threat to the lake they are. Those interested in maintaining the lake can only speculate that sewage and sediment will affect the lake’s ecology sooner or later. Careful ecological studies could help rank such potential ecological threats to the lake.

In the absence of sound information about ecological impact, prioritization might be dangerous and misleading; one practitioner suggested that in this case the wisest strategy is to treat all threats as equal and try to address them all until more information about relative impact can be obtained. But because of resource limitations, practitioners may have to focus and prioritize their activities in the absence of complete information about ecological impacts.

Careful social assessment might provide a better understanding of whether it would be easier to reduce soil erosion or improve sewage plant functioning. The feasibility of maintaining or changing a specific behavior is determined by the kinds of social factors that influence it. For this reason it may not be possible to complete the selection of critical behaviors to target until some understanding has been developed of the factors that motivate various potentially critical behaviors.

Focusing on Specific Behaviors

Focusing on specific, rather than general, behaviors is an important tool for identifying critical behaviors. At Dzanga-Sangha National Park in the Central African Republic, for example, a natural resources manager may initially believe that hunting is a behavior that must be changed to prevent the depletion of local wildlife. A closer examination may reveal that it is the use of wire snares by commercial hunters rather than the traditional hunting methods of forest pygmies that is leading to the decline in animal numbers. In Madagascar, staying out of a nature reserve may not be the critical behavior to maintain, but rather it may be critical to prevent cutting, burning, or grazing cattle in the forests of the reserve. Entering the reserve to engage in sustainable practices, such as gathering of medicinal plants and guiding tourists, could be compatible with conservation.

Emphasizing the Positive

Taking a positive view, and emphasizing opportunities rather than problems - looking for sustainable behaviors to maintain, promote, and enhance, rather than unsustainable practices to change - is probably an underexploited approach to conservation and natural resources management. The goal of such a positive approach would be to identify the sustainable behaviors people are already practicing - to look for what is right rather than what is wrong. For example, a rapid rural appraisal carried out in Senegal provides a number of excellent examples of traditional practices employed by farmers to conserve and regenerate natural resources, including fallowing, crop rotation, spreading manure on fields, rotating cattle among fields at night to fertilize the fields, cutting firewood in a certain way from certain tree species to encourage resprouting, and carefully protecting certain tree species when fields are plowed (Freudenberger and Freudenberger, 1993). These behaviors reflect indigenous knowledge about the sustainable management of natural resources in that environment and they should be supported and maintained in the interest of sustainability.

Behavioral Flexibility

Behavior can be thought of as an adaptive, flexible tracking mechanism that people use to cope with a dynamic, ever-changing environment. Not recognizing this flexible, adaptive nature of behavior “may lead to an overly static interpretation of what is happening,” according to Karen S. Freudenberger. She warns that during the assessment stage there may be “... a great tendency to take a snapshot of behaviors at the time the research is taking place and to respond to that snapshot” in planning activities to influence behaviors. To guard against that tendency, practitioners should keep the dynamic, flexible nature of behavior clearly in mind. A suite of behaviors can make up a livelihood strategy or “coping-strategy,” and be motivated by the desire to minimize risks (Mace, 1993; Mwangi and Perrings, 1993).

Behaviors used for coping during times of crisis were identified during a rapid rural appraisal study in Senegal (Freudenberger and Freudenberger, 1993). The coping behaviors included eating wild leaves, trading “neow” fruit - a wild fruit - for millet, selling chickens, cutting branches for animal feed, and practicing domestic and international migration. The matrix of historical trends in Figure 6 shows how those coping behaviors changed during the past 50 years, as a response to stresses and crises of various kinds.

Figure 6. Behavioral Flexibility for Coping with Social and Ecological Crises in a Senegalese Village

Source: Freudenberger and Freudenberger, 1993, p. 32

Understanding The Key Factors That Influence Behaviors

After the decisions, actions, and practices that are the most critical to maintain or change have been identified, the next step is to understand the determinants of, motivations for, and influences on critical behaviors. Before anyone can effectively influence behaviors, it is necessary to understand why individuals, organizations, and communities take certain actions, make certain decisions, and engage in certain practices that affect the environment; to explore a range of factors that could influence or moti-vate critical behaviors, and to understand which perceived benefits and barriers are the key ones.

Questions to ask about why people do what they do include the following: What social and ecological factors determine, motivate, or influence the critical behaviors identified in the previous step of the assessment process? Which of those factors are most important? Which are easiest to influence? Which factors could be influenced at the local level? Which factors would require work at the national or international levels to influence?

The problem is that the number of social factors that could potentially affect a given target behavior is vast, and the factors are interrelated in complex ways. How can practitioners sort it all out? In discussing its use of social assessments, for example, The World Bank stated: “Given the range of social factors which might be considered, social assessments must be selective and strategic, and provide information for decision making” (World Bank, 1994). A number of techniques may help sort out this complexity, including using checklists of potentially important factors; research on what the actors themselves perceive to be the benefits of, and barriers to, critical behaviors; and developing causal webs or wiring diagrams of social systems.

Potentially Important Factors

One way to try to understand what key factors influence, motivate, or determine critical behaviors in a given situation is to consider all factors that might be important because they have been found to be important in some other cases. Lists of potentially important factors are not exhaustive, of course, and furthermore, since they are part of a system in which components are interrelated, any such list is somewhat arbitrary. Potentially important social factors to consider include the following:

Potentially important ecological factors include the following (Noss and Cooperrider, 1994; Smith, 1992):

Checklists of such factors could be used by practitioners to help them systematically consider the possibilities. Checklists may be useful tools; they can help organize information gathering at this step. Decision tree or flow diagram techniques based on such lists are described in Chapter IV, and an example is shown in Figure 20. Such methods can potentially help identify the most relevant and important factors in each case.

A large body of literature describes methods for social impact assessment, which often uses checklists of potentially important social factors (Finsterbusch, Ingersoll, and Llewellyn, 1990; Freudenberg, 1986; Geisler, 1993; Hough, 1991; Interorganizational Committee, 1994). Social impact assessments are usually done by teams of trained social scientists. The social assessments used by the World Bank, described in Box 4, are an example of this kind of approach.

The complexity of the web of social factors that could potentially affect conservation behaviors makes understanding the key factors a very difficult task even for professional social scientists. In real situations it is hard to know where to start. Developing an understanding of the key factors that influence a behavior is even more difficult for conservation practitioners, most of whom are not trained in social sciences. One experienced field manager said, “Many behaviors share multiple causes and most causes are linked to multiple behaviors. Trying to disentangle the web is a major challenge - one which our field-level practitioners, both national and expatriate, are having difficulty addressing.”

Box 4. World Bank Social Assessments

The World Bank has recently developed a process it calls "social assessment" for bringing social analysis into its operations. Social assessment is described as “the systematic investigation of the social processes and social factors that affect development impacts and results... Social assessment (SA) is a process which supports participation and makes explicit the social factors that affect development impacts and results.”

“There are many social factors which need to be taken into account in development operations (gender, ethnicity, social impacts, institutional capacity). In the past these factors have generally been analyzed separately, with the result that some issues received attention while others were overlooked. Social assessments provide an integrated framework for deciding what issues have priority for attention and how operationally useful information can be gathered and used.” The Bank’s note on social assessment lists six types of “social factors affecting poverty, participation, and project success”:

  • Demographic factors
  • Social diversity
  • Socioeconomic determinants
  • Social organization
  • Sociopolitical context
  • Needs and values

In terms of methods, “Social assessments use a variety of data collection and analysis methods from the social sciences ...” and “involve consultation with stakeholders and affected groups and other forms of data collection and analysis.”

Source: “Social Assessment: Incorporating Participation and Social Analysis into the Bank’s Operational Work”; Note from the World Bank, Environmental and Social Policy Division (ENVSP), May 10, 1994 (World Bank, 1994).

Perceived Benefits and Barriers

One approach for trying to cut through the potential complexity of social systems in order to understand behaviors involves going first to the actors themselves and trying to understand their decision making. This approach asks them - albeit indirectly sometimes - why they do what they do, rather than assuming anything about their motivations. This pragmatic approach has been developed and used extensively in social marketing (see Chap. VI). The idea is to determine what the actors themselves see as the benefits of, and barriers to, a given behavior (Middlestadt, et al., 1993; Middlestadt, Smith, and Bossi, 1993; Smith, 1994). “A benefit is what is motivating, desirable, rewarding, or pleasant about a behavior people now practice - what the actors think they gain from a behavior they now do, or think they will gain from changing their behavior. A barrier is what people think is or will be difficult, unpleasant, or undesirable about adopting a different practice” (Middlestadt, Smith, and Bossi, 1993).

The terms “benefits” and “barriers” attempt to distill the complex array of factors that might influence a given behavior into a more understandable, relevant set of key factors. This approach can lead to surprises; the social factors assumed to motivate a given behavior by social scientists or development experts may not be the same as the benefits and barriers actually perceived by the actors themselves. Un-derstanding the actors’ perceptions can sometimes quickly open avenues for creative problem solving, as examples of the use of this approach in the health sector have shown (see Box 5).

Box 5. Understanding Behaviors: Examples from the Health Sector

An approach that emphasized understanding and influencing behavior was used in Guatemala in a campaign to reduce the incidence of diarrheal diseases by increasing the use of a community water system (Graeff, Elder, and Booth, 1993). An interdisciplinary team identified many behaviors that linked use of the water system to reductions in diarrheal diseases, but eventually selected hand washing by mothers as the key behavior on which to focus. Direct behavioral observation, individual interviews, and focus groups provided information about the perceived benefits of, and barriers to, hand washing by mothers. It was clear that mothers knew that they should wash their hands to prevent the spread of diarrheal diseases, and could do so properly; therefore, the low rate of correct hand washing was not due to knowledge or skills barriers. Other motivational barriers to hand washing were then explored. Direct behavioral observation showed that, far from being a simple behavior, correct hand washing actually needed forty-six steps to perform and took two minutes in the conditions of a Guatemalan village. If women washed their hands correctly each time it was required for proper sanitation, they would spend nearly one hour each day washing their hands and would have to carry an additional jug of water from the village tap to their homes each day! Handwashing was so costly in terms of time and labor that the barriers outweighed the perceived benefits in most cases. Reducing the time and trouble needed to wash hands was obviously the kind of intervention needed to increase the frequency of the behavior.

Another example comes from a project designed to increase immunization rates in Honduran children (Graeff, Elder, and Booth, 1993). The first step toward a solution was to recognize that the problem was not just that few mothers were bringing their children to the clinic for immunizations overall, but that very few were bringing them back after the first shot to complete the full immunization series. The project therefore focused on a key behavior: increasing repeat visits to the immunization clinic. A survey showed that mothers had sufficient knowledge about the need for and timing of immunizations; the barrier to behavior change was not lack of knowledge, so other motivational factors were involved. Direct behavioral observation of interactions between health workers, mothers, and children showed that health workers were often impersonal, insensitive, and even impolite to both mothers and children. “It could be expected that the mother would feel punished by this experience and be less likely to return to the clinic or recommend the experience to her neighbors.” In this case intangible interpersonal benefits and barriers were at work, and improving the interpersonal communication skills of workers at the immunization clinic was obviously needed to increase repeat visits. To change the behavior of mothers, training in interpersonal communication for health workers was the logical intervention to adopt.

In both of these cases, preliminary assessment and research showed that lack of awareness and knowledge were not the reason that diarrheal diseases were common and immunization rates were low. Without knowing this, health promoters might have designed education and communication campaigns to increase knowledge of the causes of diarrheal diseases, the techniques of correct hand washing, or the need for immunizations and the recommended timing for them - without effect. Ineffective interventions were avoided, and effective ones developed, because of simple social research that helped provide an understanding of the perceived benefits and barriers that influenced hand-washing and immunization behaviors.

Any of the potentially important factors listed above could act as benefits and barriers. Each is discussed briefly below.

Knowledge

Sometimes lack of knowledge or awareness of the negative environmental consequences of a decision, practice, or action is a barrier to the adoption of more sustainable behaviors. Environmental educators often make this assumption, sometimes without testing it through adequate assessment and research, before proceeding with activities designed to increase knowledge and awareness. If people know about the negative consequences of their behavior but do it anyway, other motivational factors must be at work.

Values

Even if people know about the environmental consequences of their behavior they may not consider those consequences undesirable because of their values (see Chap. I). They may not value some of the nonmaterial uses of ecosystems or nonhuman species, for example. Knowledge may influence values in some cases. If people do not know about some of the indirect material benefits of natural ecosystems - the life support and ecosystem services benefits - they may not recognize their value. Knowledge may be needed to allow some values to be expressed, and in some cases knowledge has been shown to influence expressions of values such as attitudes and opinions (Byers, 1988).

Social Norms

Social norms are another important category of benefits and barriers. Practitioners can determine whether social norms are functioning as a benefit or barrier by asking people who they listen to, whose opinion they care about, and who they turn to for advice and support, and then determining how those key individuals or opinion leaders behave. Social norms often relate to social status and respect. In Madagascar, for instance, if a respected traditional spiritual leader says that killing lemurs is bad, that can influence behavior. If a rich and popular village leader made his money from slash-and-burn cultivation in mountain forests, his behavior could set a norm that may influence other people’s actions.

Sociocultural Factors

Sociocultural factors such as traditions, customs, beliefs, and taboos can play significant roles in influencing natural resource management behaviors (see Box 6). In many cases sociocultural factors are closely related to values, which were discussed above. Omari (1990) discusses the importance of many of these sociocultural factors in African societies, and describes a general “reverence for natural resources” in many cultures. For example, in Ghana and throughout much of Africa, people conserve certain forest areas because they view them as “sacred groves” (Dorm-Adzobu, 1991). In Madagascar, sociocultural factors such as taboos and beliefs are important motivations in not killing lemurs and maintaining large cattle herds for funerary sacrifices, behaviors which clearly influence natural resources.

Options

People may know that a practice has negative environmental consequences, and also hold values that would lead them to change their behavior, all else being equal. But they may have no options, alternatives, or opportunities or they may lack the resources to take advantage of such options. Sometimes options are provided by technology, such as new crop varieties, water pumps, terracing techniques, or electric fences. Other options may be social, such as new forms of governance or tenure, or new laws and policies. Lack of options can act as a barrier to behavior change.

Skills

Skills are an important category of benefits and barriers (Middlestadt et al., 1993; Middlestadt, Smith, and Bossi, 1993). Actual and perceived skills have been shown to be a key determinant of environmental behavior (Hungerford and Volk, 1990). Lack of skills, whether actual or perceived, may be a barrier to behavior change. If a new behavior requires technical skills, training, or practice, people’s fear of failing or embarrassing themselves may be a barrier to its adoption. On the other hand, having skills, or the perception of being able to do a certain behavior, can empower people to take action (Hungerford and Volk, 1990).

In Madagascar, for example, villagers may not have a number of skills - such as language ability - needed for guiding tourists interested in birdwatching or botanists searching for potentially useful plants. This lack of skills may act as a barrier to adopting those new practices. Villagers do know how to practice slash-and-burn cultivation and make charcoal, however, and these familiar skills motivate them to maintain practices that may be unsustainable. At Lake Nakuru, Kenya, lack of skills may be a barrier to adoption of some of the new behaviors that the practitioners working with the integrated conservation and development project there would like them to adopt, including planting living thorn fences, small-scale dairying, and terracing to reduce soil erosion.

In the Honduran immunization example discussed in Box 5, the health workers’ lack of interpersonal communication skills was a barrier to getting mothers to bring children to the immunization clinic after the first visit. A parallel exists in natural resources management and conservation. If conservationists or natural resources managers lack skills in communicating and working cooperatively with local people, that lack may create a motivational barrier to the adoption of the conservation and management behaviors those practitioners are promoting.

Economics

Direct, tangible material values and uses are what are typically thought of as economic benefits. Direct material benefits are extremely important factors, because they often fill basic subsistence needs (see Table 1). As was discussed in Chapter I, however, direct material benefits represent only one category of the diverse values and uses of natural resources. Indirect material benefits and nonmaterial benefits - both of which are often not given a monetary value or traded at all, although they often could be - also motivate natural resource management behaviors. An example comes from Nepal, where social research showed that the assumption that the attitudes of local people toward a wildlife refuge would be related to their economic costs from wildlife damage to crops was false (Heinen, 1993). In fact, their attitudes were correlated mainly with sociocultural factors, especially religion.

Some people assume that decisions about natural resources are based primarily or solely on such direct material, or economic, incentives and disincentives. That assumption often leads them to minimize or ignore the importance of other kinds of factors. Practitioners working with economic development organizations are perhaps especially prone to assume the primacy of economic motivations for behavior.

Research on traditional livelihood strategies and production systems has often shown that the decisions of those who follow them are not motivated primarily by the kinds of short-term, material, market-oriented values that many modern economists believe in. Risk aversion and minimization and long-term security may be more important factors (Mace, 1993; Mwangi and Perrings, 1993). Such research suggests that “... the objectives of peasant households ... not only extend beyond economic (production) goals, but that such economic goals may be a strictly subsidiary part of household objectives” (Mwangi and Perrings, 1993). Traditional livelihood practices may be motivated far more by the desire to reduce long-term risk than for short-term economic gain.

Laws

Laws can provide both incentives and disincentives for influencing behaviors, although it is the disincentives for unsustainable practices - in the form of fines, prison sentences, and other kinds of physical threats up to and including death - that most people think of first. Legal disincentives are sometimes effective at changing behavior, and sometimes not. Sometimes laws provide incentives for unsustainable practices. Sometimes people do not know the law or do not respect it. Legal factors meant to influence behaviors then interact with other factors such as knowledge, values, and social norms, as was the case with the law against killing marine birds on the Quebec North Shore (Box 2). In such a case, education and communication may be needed to allow laws to act as incentives or disincentives as intended.

Because legal benefits and barriers are often economic (e.g., tax breaks, fines) or have economic implications (e.g., prison sentences), people may make an economic decision when deciding whether to obey a law or not. In some cases, the potential for positive economic benefits from breaking the law is a stronger motivation for behavior than the potential legal disincentives, leading some people to make a conscious, rational decision to disobey the law. This sometimes appears to be the case with rhino and elephant poaching, for example (Leader-Williams and Milner-Gulland, 1993), where the value of illegal wildlife products is high, and fines or the risk of jail sentences is relatively low.

Policies

Policies, like laws, can act as both benefits or barriers in influencing behaviors. Also like laws, they sometimes have the effect desired by the policymakers, and sometimes they do not. In Namibia, for example, the national government is trying to promote a reduction in the killing of roan antelope and other threatened species. Barbara Wyckoff-Baird, a community participation specialist with the World Wildlife Fund’s Living in a Finite Environment (LIFE) Project in Namibia, explained the situation: According to Namibian wildlife law and policy all wildlife, including roan, belong to the national government, not to the residents of the communal lands on which many of these animals live. Roan are quite valuable if captured alive for the live animal market - much more valuable alive than dead in economic terms. A man in the Otjozondjupa Region, in the Kalahari Desert in eastern Namibia, explained why he might shoot a roan if he saw one, however. If he shoots it, he will get the meat for his family.

If he lets it go, the next person who sees it may shoot it for its meat, or government game war-dens may capture it and sell it for a lot of money, none of which will go to him. He and his fam-ily will benefit only if he shoots it. Wildlife law and policy thus leads to an incentive for indi-viduals on communal lands to kill roan for meat. In a March 1995 policy reform designed to change this incentive, the government stated its intention to give the residents of communal lands use rights to animals on those lands, on a quota system set up by the government. Com-munal area residents could then capture roan alive, sell them, and divide the profits among the community, theoretically providing an in-centive to capture rather than kill these ante-lope. The legislation needed to implement this new policy is not yet in place, however, so for the time being the temptation for individuals to kill roan remains.

In Mali, where the forestry code makes all trees the property of the national government, a similar kind of logic may work to discourage tree planting by individual farmers. Although individuals may still gain some benefits from trees they plant on their land, they are not entitled to all the benefits they might receive if they “owned” the trees they planted and grew on their land according to Abdoulaye Dagamaissa, a Malian forester.

Gender

Men and women often perceive and use natural resources differently, so gender is an important factor to consider in any attempt to understand the social and ecological context of behavior vis-a-vis the environment. “In many developing countries, women are the primary managers and users of natural resources. Yet, gender is an often overlooked element in agriculture, water, and forestry programs and projects. Gender analysis increases our understanding of the gender-based division of labor, indigenous knowledge, resource access and control, and participation in community institutions with respect to natural resource management” (Thomas-Slayter, Esser, and Shields, 1993). Figures 10 and 12 give examples of how simple, participatory tools of social research can provide important information about gender-based differences in natural resource use.

Multiple Factors

Complex mixes of factors, rather than one single factor, often motivate behaviors, of course. Since communities are not homogeneous, different factors can motivate the same behavior in different people. A full understanding of behavioral motivations is probably impossible, but some level of understanding is necessary for planning effective activities to influence behaviors. An example from Zimbabwe’s CAMPFIRE program, discussed in Box 6, illustrates the complex, changing mix of benefits and barriers that can influence conservation behaviors.

A Few Complications

Perhaps the major complication with the benefits and barriers calculus is that costs and benefits of a given behavior may be apportioned to different actors (individuals or groups). For example, the economic benefits of killing a rhino for its horn may go to a few poachers; the costs may be distributed among all citizens of a country, whose revenues from wildlife tourism are reduced when their rhinos become extinct. Or, the costs may be borne by a small group - farmers on the border of a national park whose crops suffer wildlife damage, for example - while the benefits are distributed among another group of stakeholders, such as owners of and workers in the ecotourism sector. It may sometimes be true that the benefits flow to the present generation (from unsustainable cutting of a forest, for example), while the costs are passed on to future generations.

Yet another kind of complication arises because many of the factors that influence behavior are structural, that is, the locus of decision making is at a higher level in the political hierarchy. Laws and policies, often made at the national level, are good examples. Economic factors, which are often determined at the national, regional, or even international level, are another example. Some scholars and practitioners even express the view that policies, macroeconomics, and other structural factors are the main influences on behaviors at the local level. Such structural barriers cannot be easily addressed at the community or project level. In such cases, understanding the importance of structural factors can help practitioners and communities recognize that they have to work to influence national or even international actors to develop sustainable natural resources management at the local level.

Box 6. Benefits and Barriers in Zimbabwe’s CAMPFIRE Program

CAMPFIRE is an acronym for “Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources.” During the colonial period and even after Independence, all wildlife in Zimbabwe were legally the property of the state. The key to the later development of the CAMPFIRE program was a national policy change that granted the authority for some district-level governments to manage and receive benefits from the wildlife in their districts (Metcalfe, 1994).

Professor Marshall Murphree is Director of the Centre for Applied Social Sciences at the University of Zimbabwe, which provides social analysis and applied research for the CAMPFIRE program. He said that in Zimbabwe in general and the CAMPFIRE program in particular, it is generally assumed that economic motivations for behavior are primary. These economic motivations are either to meet basic subsistence needs or to improve the standard and quality of individual and community lives. “We’re accused of being economic cowboys in our policies here,” he said.

Professor Murphree recognizes that economic motivations may not be primary in all cases, however. Emmanuel Kawadza, a Senior Ecologist in the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Management, said that based on his experience giving talks in villages about the values of wildlife, the “ethical value of wildlife is the strongest.”

Professor Murphree makes some important points about behavioral motivations for conservation. For one thing, “different cultures and ecologies throw up different configurations of behavioral motivations.” For another, behavioral motivations change over time. As an example, he mentioned that in one of his first speeches in Masoka village (now a successful model of the CAMPFIRE approach), he told people “You realize these animals are worth money!” They responded with derisive laughter, because to them at that time, wildlife “were nothing but a nuisance, good, if at all, only in the pot!” Now, through CAMPFIRE, they realize they can earn money from them, and their motivations for conservation have changed.

Professor Murphree also said that recently the safari hunting concessionaire at Masoka asked the village for permission to develop a new hunting camp at an especially attractive place. The villagers were reluctant to grant permission because that place had been consecrated by the spirit mediums - an offering had been buried there, and it was considered a sacred place. The village asked for advice from some members of the CAMPFIRE Association, who suggested that if it would help them earn money, they should grant permission for the new camp. After deliberation, however, they decided not to give their permission; in making this decision, nonmaterial sociocultural benefits outweighed material economic ones.

Lately, Professor Murphree said, “Political self-assertion is coming up as one of the principal motivating factors in what they are doing at Masoka,” and some decisions may be motivated by that, as much as or more than by money.

Causal Webs or Wiring Diagrams

Models or diagrams, such as “causal webs” (Miller, Shinn, and Bentley, 1994) or social “wiring diagrams” (Harrison, 1993), have been used to conceptualize social and ecological factors and their linkages. Because social factors are part of a system, and are all interrelated, any such model is arbitrary to some degree. Models may nevertheless be useful as tools for conceptualization and information gathering, just as are checklists of potentially important factors. One such social wiring diagram is shown in Figure 7. The boxes interposed between Consumption and Environment in this diagram - labeled “Resources,” “Space,” and “Wastes” - form the behavioral interface shown in Figure 1. It is human behaviors, after all, that use resources, take up space, and produce wastes.

Figure 7. Diagram of Social System Components and Their Environmental Linkages

Graphic Has Been Removed

Source: Harrison, The Third Revolution, 1993, p. 268