Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
aspirations, and of how they relate to nature. Imposing Western values will
not work.
●
Ensuring that the key local
opinion-formers
are engaged and are convinced of
the value of the approach.
●
Making sure that interventions promoting goodwill are providing services
that the community wants, and particularly that those whose behaviour you
are trying to influence
benefit
from the interventions (for example, if hunters
don't benefit from a grain storage facility, providing it will improve relations
with the village but may not change the incentives of the people who matter
most for conservation success).
The
framework for analysis
is predominately sociological and psychological,
understanding how people's attitudes and opinions are shaped, and how these
affect their behaviour (e.g. Tanner 1999; Bamberg 2003). In a study of factors
affecting environmental behaviour towards water in the Scottish Highlands, Spash
et al
. (in press) show that people's behaviour is most strongly determined by their
ethical beliefs and their perceptions of the social dynamics of changing behaviour,
rather than by economic costs and benefits. Demonstrating the link between
attitudes and behaviour
is often difficult in conservation, where the activities of
interest may be illegal, and changes in the status of exploited species are hard to
assign to changes in an individual person's behaviour. Unsurprisingly, therefore,
when Holmes (2003) reviewed the literature on local communities' relationships
to protected areas he found that, although there are a number of studies looking
at attitudes to conservation, very few carry this through to demonstrate that
attitudinal change has actually led to behavioural change, and hence to conservation
success.
There are two main
issues
with this approach. Although promoting community
goodwill and the non-use value of nature through education and public awareness-
raising are ubiquitous components of conservation, there has been no proper
analysis
of how best to approach promoting these values, or of the cost-effectiveness of
different interventions. It may be that leaflets, films and talks interest people, and
may change their short-term attitudes, but cannot in themselves affect behaviour—
in which case are they worth substantial investments of time and money? Because
virtually all conservation projects have these components, and they are not usually
clearly costed and monitored, it is very difficult to disentangle their effects from all
the project's other activities. Examples such as the World Pheasant Association's
intervention discussed in Box 6.4 are important and particularly useful because
there are fewer confounding variables than usual.
The second issue is that goodwill gestures and raising concern for the environ-
ment are mainly likely to be useful in situations where the
costs
of refraining from
a damaging activity are low. They are unlikely to work in isolation when the activity
is a substantial contributor to livelihoods. In these cases, economic necessity may
override cultural value. However, even this has been shown not to be entirely true
when non-use values are very high. Even in extreme conflict situations local people
