Experimental evidence for conservation conflict interventions: The importance of financial payments, community trust and equity attitudes

Abstract

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The role of incentive-based instruments and social equity in conservation conflict interventions

“…Although our incentive structure differed from common practices in experimental economics (rewarding players based on their scores), there is precedence in the experimental literature for being flexible with the incentive structure to ensure compatibility with local concerns (e.g., Bell et al 2015, Meinzen-Dick et al 2016, Rakotonarivo et al 2021b. Our priority was to create a safe sphere for participants to engage fully and state their preferences for various interventions.…”

“…We developed a highly interactive game to understand how farmers respond to alternative conflict intervention strategies in Gabon (Rakotonarivo et al 2021b). Games have emerged as an effective means to engage stakeholders and enable player responses, mimicking real-world reactions through immersion (Redpath et al 2018).…”

“…Games can help to develop decision-making theory, to understand patterns in conflict, and to elucidate possible solutions for environmental issues (Redpath et al 2018). Games have been used to foster more sustainable practices or transformative changes (e.g., Mayer et al 2014, Rodela et al 2019, as well as to test theoretical predictions of human behavior in various natural resource dilemmas (e.g., Cardenas et al 2013, Janssen et al 2010, Travers et al 2011, Andersson et al 2018, Rakotonarivo et al 2021b. Here, we used a game as a low-cost and low-risk tool to engage farmers and investigate how they react to potential management strategies in a setting where real-life experiments would be impractical.…”

Community-Based Conservation for the Sustainable Management of Conservation Conflicts: Learning from Practitioners

“…Based on research on conservation conflicts, many of the normative elements needed for the long-term resolution of conflicts have been discussed [15][16][17]. These include local stakeholders as the principal drivers of solutions [18,19], building trust between stakeholders [20][21][22], and tailoring interventions to social norms, context, and scale [23,24]. Community-based conservation has been put forward as an approach to include local communities in such conflict resolution efforts, leading to more long-term and sustainable conservation and social outcomes [25][26][27].…”

Intervene or wait? Modelling the timing of intervention in conservation conflicts adaptive management under uncertainty

“…A conservation conflict can arise when such a species is strictly protected but also impacts human livelihood, potentially leading to a clash of interests over management decisions (Redpath et al 2013, 2015). Diverging objectives can lead land-users to defect from policies by ignoring or subverting them and engage in illegal activities often hindering conservation objectives (Bainbridge 2017, Bunnefeld et al 2017, Glynatsi et al 2018, Rakotonarivo et al 2020). These conflicts are especially serious when conservation and protection interferes with essential livelihood activities such as agriculture (Behr et al 2017, Mason et al 2017).…”