Solving the participation puzzle: Understanding mechanisms behind causal effects of randomized controlled trials in conservation

解决参与难题：了解保护中随机对照试验因果效应背后的机制

• 批准号: 2242087
• 负责人: Jonathan Bauchet
• 金额: $ 11.36万
• 依托单位: Purdue University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2023-06-01 至 2024-11-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2242087&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Solving; participation; puzzle; Understanding; mechanisms

This project examines the motivation for people to engage in conservation. Individuals and households potentially respond to a wide range of variables that can promote conservation-oriented behavior, including financial incentives and social, cultural, political, and institutional factors. Within a population, individuals may exhibit additional variation related to personalities, values, identities, and social norms. This research focuses on how these factors interact with material rewards to shape the willingness of individuals and households to accept payments for environmental conservation, an approach that is commonly employed in cost-share programs in the United States and other countries. This study helps researchers to understand how people perceive such payments and who enrolls in such programs, information that can inform the design and effective implementation of these programs to be more inclusive and effective at promoting environmental conservation. This project also contributes to improving research methods used by cultural anthropologists and researchers in other disciplines by combining in-depth interviews with a large-scale experiment. The organization of an open workshop allows the researchers to promote the methodological approach among social scientists and other audiences, including students.This research aims to explore why individuals who have been offered material incentives to promote environmental conservation, either conditional upon their adoption of specific behaviors or unconditionally, may be equally likely to participate in the program. Among environmental social scientists, unconditional incentives have conventionally been expected to be more appealing, particularly to marginalized populations, including women and poorer households, who commonly face higher barriers to participation and more difficulties to meet program conditions. In contrast to those expectations, however, prior research has shown that the conditionality of compensation may not be predictive of participation in programs. This project uses ethnographic methods and cultural consensus analysis to assess the mechanisms behind this unexpected finding from a previous study, which employed a randomized controlled trial. Alongside consideration of multiple hypotheses from diverse academic disciplines, this project also examines a new hypothesis that cultural norms about trust, intrinsic motivation, and perceptions of fairness play a more prominent role in households’ decisions to participate in conservation programs than the conditionality of the programs’ payments. The ethnographic work that is being conducted as part of this project helps to contextualize the prior findings and advance theory in the interdisciplinary study of conservation behavior. The results of this work are shared with policymakers and other institutions that manage natural resources.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

该项目检查人们进行保护的动机。个人和家庭有可能对可以促进面向保护的行为的广泛变量做出反应，包括经济激励措施以及社会，文化，政治和制度因素。在人群中，个人可能存在与个性，价值观，身份和社会规范有关的其他差异。这项研究的重点是这些因素如何与物质奖励相互作用，以塑造个人和家庭接受环境保护付款的意愿，这是美国和其他国家的成本共享计划中通常采用的一种方法。这项研究可帮助研究人员了解人们如何看待此类付款，并参与此类计划，这些信息可以为这些计划的设计和有效实施提供信息，以更具包容性和有效性来促进环境保护。该项目还有助于改善文化人类学家和其他学科研究人员使用的研究方法，通过将深入的访谈与大规模实验相结合。开放研讨会的组织使研究人员能够在社会科学家和其他受众（包括学生）之间促进方法论方法。这项研究的目的是探讨为什么提供物质激励以促进环境保护的个人，以促进环境保护的基础，这是有条件地采用特定行为或无条件地参与该计划的原因。在环境社会科学家中，通常预计无条件的激励措施会更具吸引力，尤其是对包括妇女和贫困家庭在内的边缘化人群，她们通常面临更高的参与障碍，并有更多难以满足计划条件的困难。但是，与这些期望相反，先前的研究表明，薪酬的条件可能无法预测参与计划的参与。该项目使用民族志方法和文化共识分析来评估这一意外发现的机制，该发现是先前研究的意外发现，该研究是进行了随机对照试验的。除了考虑潜水学学科的多种假设外，该项目还研究了一个新的假设，即关于信任，内在动机和公平认识的文化规范在家庭决策中比该计划的付款条件更重要。作为该项目的一部分进行的民族志工作有助于将先前的发现和推进理论背景，并在保护行为的跨学科研究中。这项工作的结果与管理自然资源的政策制定者和其他机构共享。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并通过使用基金会的知识分子优点和更广泛的影响审查标准来评估被认为是宝贵的支持。