Chacón, Adriana, Stoeckl, Natalie, Jarvis, Diane, and Pressey, Bob (2016) Using insights about key factors impacting 'quality of life' to inform effective on-farm conservation programs: a case study in Northern Australia. Australasian Journal of Environmental Management, 23 (4). pp. 338-355.

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Abstract

Conservation of biodiversity is an ongoing challenge. Governments face many constraints when pursuing conservation, one of the most pervasive being limited budgets for buying land for conservation. To achieve conservation goals, an alternative to acquisition is on-farm conservation. Research suggests that the success of on-farm conservation programs depends primarily on land managers’ behaviour. In the past, one of the tools used for on-farm conservation has been financial incentives but these may be ineffective if they do not align with the intrinsic motivations of land managers. Our paper seeks to learn more about the intrinsic motivations of land managers by learning more about what contributes to their overall quality of life (life satisfaction). We hypothesize that by understanding the drivers of land manager’s subjective assessments of their own life satisfaction we will be able to shed light on the types of incentives that could help promote on-farm conservation. Our analysis highlights that good relationships are the most important contributor to land managers' life satisfaction. We conclude that programs which help maintain good social networks whilst encouraging on-farm conservation are likely to align with intrinsic motivations of land managers and might therefore be more successful in making genuine additional contributions to biodiversity than programs providing only financial incentives.

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