The success of conservation efforts for imperiled and endangered wildlife species relies on private landowners, yet a definitive model of landowner cooperation remains elusive. Landowner characteristics are sometimes related to program participation in conservation programs for at-risk species, but consistent patterns of participation have not emerged. A new paper by ACS and colleagues at Virginia Tech and Oregon State University explores the multiple pathways to participation in a conservation program. Published in the journal Conservation Science and Practice, the research explores the multiple pathways by which demographics, rootedness, resource dependence, environmental attitudes, social influence, and program structure intersect to jointly explain participation in a federally funded cost-share program to help prevent the Lesser Prairie-Chicken from being listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.
We conducted structured interviews across three ecoregions with 64 participants and 22 nonparticipants. We analyzed the data using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, an approach that identifies the multiple combinations of conditions related to engagement in the program. We found that two concepts, landowner characteristics and social influence, were most commonly associated with participation while profiles representing typical landowner tropes performed poorly. Also, a positive effect of encouragement by agency representatives suggests that agency staff play a central role in determining participation. It also suggests landowners’ decision processes may not be as deliberative as the literature on private lands conservation suggests. The results of our case study suggest new avenues for research that explicitly consider the role of heuristics in decisions to participate.
Lessons from this case study suggest that (a) participation is jointly influenced by a number of factors (but not necessarily by land regulation concerns), and (b) because a landowner’s decision to enroll may not be fully deliberative, agency personnel can play a key role at the point of contact once a landowner expresses a need for their land. As important, it confirms an obvious, but often underappreciated, issue related to conservation programs and their design: multiple pathways to participation are likely the norm as opposed to the exception.