Resources for the Future, 1616 P St, NW, Washington DC, 20036, USA.
School of Environment and Natural Resources, The Ohio State University, Wooster, OH, 44691, USA.
J Environ Manage. 2022 Jan 15;302(Pt A):113961. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2021.113961. Epub 2021 Oct 23.
Owners and managers of private lands make decisions that have implications well beyond the boundaries of their land, influencing species conservation, water quality, wildfire risk, and other environmental outcomes with important societal and ecological consequences. Understanding how these decisions are made is key for informing interventions to support better outcomes. However, explanations of the drivers of decision making are often siloed in social science disciplines that differ in focus, theory, methodology, and terminology, hindering holistic understanding. To address these challenges, we propose a conceptual model of private land conservation decision-making that integrates theoretical perspectives from three dominant disciplines: economics, sociology, and psychology. The model highlights how heterogeneity in behavior across decision-makers is driven by interactions between the decision context, attributes of potential conservation behaviors, and attributes of the decision-maker. These differences in both individual attributes and context shape decision-makers' constraints and the potential and perceived consequences of a behavior. The model also captures how perceived consequences are evaluated and weighted through a decision-making process that may range from systematic to heuristic, ultimately resulting in selection of a behavior. Outcomes of private land behaviors across the landscape feed back to alter the socio-environmental conditions that shape future decisions. The conceptual model is designed to facilitate better communication, collaboration, and integration across disciplines and points to methodological innovations that can expand understanding of private land decision-making. The model also can be used to illuminate how behavior change interventions (e.g., policies, regulations, technical assistance) could be designed to target different drivers to encourage environmentally and socially beneficial behaviors on private lands.
私人土地所有者和管理者所做的决策不仅会影响其土地范围，还会影响物种保护、水质、野火风险等环境结果，进而对社会和生态产生重要影响。了解这些决策是如何做出的，对于提供干预措施以支持更好的结果至关重要。然而，对决策驱动因素的解释往往局限于社会科学学科，这些学科在重点、理论、方法和术语上存在差异，从而阻碍了全面理解。为了解决这些挑战，我们提出了一个私人土地保护决策制定的概念模型，该模型整合了三个主要学科的理论观点：经济学、社会学和心理学。该模型强调了决策者之间行为异质性是如何由决策背景、潜在保护行为的属性以及决策者的属性之间的相互作用所驱动的。这些个体属性和背景的差异塑造了决策者的约束以及行为的潜在和感知后果。该模型还捕捉了决策者如何通过可能从系统到启发式的决策过程来评估和权衡感知后果，最终导致选择一种行为。整个景观中私人土地行为的结果会反馈回来，改变塑造未来决策的社会环境条件。该概念模型旨在促进不同学科之间更好的沟通、协作和整合，并指出可以扩大对私人土地决策制定理解的方法创新。该模型还可以用来阐明如何通过行为改变干预措施（例如政策、法规、技术援助）来针对不同的驱动因素，鼓励私人土地上有益于环境和社会的行为。
