Mapping the opportunities for improving conservation by better incorporating human behaviour

Conservation has been slow to utilise new ideas from psychology and behavioural economics about shifting human behaviour through addressing social norms, messenger effects, cognitive biases and default decisions. Our workshop-centred study has systematically explored the potential for impacting conservation using such tools, and planned an agenda for testing them.

Project Aims

The overarching aim of this project was to conduct the broadest examination to date of the scope for new insights in behavioural science to help deliver biodiversity conservation. Our current understanding is limited in three ways:

the lack of a systematic assessment of which behaviour changes are most important to target to achieve conservation impact;
the limited appreciation, by many of those working in conservation, of the diversity, applicability and limitations of behaviourally-informed interventions; and
the absence of a coordinated programme for testing and reporting-back on the most promising interventions across the conservation sector.

We planned to address these limitations by convening and supporting a multi-disciplinary panel of practitioners and researchers.

Key Activities

Identifying “headline” changes to human behaviour which, if effected, would have disproportionate impacts on conservation outcomes.
Proposing candidate behavioural interventions which hold promise for delivering these behaviour changes.
Prioritising 10-20 interventions for investigation via a programme of field-based testing.

The main activity of the project was a workshop held 7-9 January 2020 in the David Attenborough Building attended by 22 leading experts in conservation and behavioural science and high-level practitioners from conservation NGOs. The workshop was organised around three focal tasks: (1) to develop causal threat chains around threatened species and ecosystems to identify key target behaviour changes; (2) to propose interventions to achieve these target behaviour changes based on state-of-the-art behavioural science; and (3) to sketch a plan for how to bring forward the workshop results and meet project deliverables. The main outcome of the workshop was an extensive set of materials around threat chains, target behaviour changes, and behaviour change interventions. These materials served as the core content around which the two perspective papers were developed. Another critical outcome was the engagement of and face-to-face interactions between workshop participants, which was essential for ensuring their continued involvement in the post-workshop proceedings.

Conservation Impact

Conservation is predominantly an exercise in trying to change human behaviour – of consumers buying unsustainably-sourced products, of farmers clearing natural habitats, or of policymakers failing to deliver on environmental commitments. Yet conservation has made only limited use of recent advances in behavioural science that have helped deliver behaviour change in many other sectors. Novel approaches – such as changing default options, providing behavioural feedback, modifying choice environments or accounting for cognitive biases – are underutilised. Instead many, and perhaps most, conservationists rely on traditional behaviour change interventions – education, regulation and material incentivisation – largely without applying recent insights from behavioural science. Our project explored how behavioural science could be more widely applied in biodiversity conservation. We considered the diverse cast of actors involved in conservation problems and the resulting breadth of behaviour changes that conservationists might want to achieve. We suggested a way of identifying key behaviour changes and actors capable of improving biodiversity outcomes and developed a catalogue of types of interventions for achieving behaviour change, considering both novel, standalone interventions and ways in which behavioural science can enhance more traditional conservation interventions. We also outlined a framework for setting priorities among interventions based on their likely impact on biodiversity outcomes. While our conclusions highlight considerable untapped potential, we also caution that behavioural science is not a silver bullet for conservation. The effects of behaviour change interventions can be modest, temporary, and context-dependent in ways that are as-yet poorly understood. We therefore recommend interventions are tested and widely reported on, so researchers and practitioners can build a much-needed evidence base on the effectiveness and the limitations of these tools.

The anticipated impact is first and foremost to inspire more work at the intersection between conservation and behavioural science – ideally though research-informed practical projects which collect and report data on their performances in ways that help guide further implementation.

Outputs

A compendium of key intervention points where behaviour changes, if achievable, would have disproportionate impacts on the fate of wild populations and the places they depend on;
A framework for identifying priority interventions which (based largely on their performance in other sectors) appear to offer considerable promise for delivering important behaviour changes, either in isolation or in tandem with regulation, financial incentives or awareness-raising;
A prospectus for future fieldwork testing the effectiveness and generalizability of these interventions, which will form the basis of a grant application for research-linked training (led by TBA); and
One brief and one extended publication, both in high-impact journals, summarizing 1-3, with accompanying media coverage (obtained by working closely with the press offices of partner universities and NGOs).