Ecological and social constraints are key for voluntary investments into renewable natural resources

Highlights

• We model voluntary investments by members of civil society into the environment.

• We analyze 1,809 freshwater resource management arrangements in Germany and France.

• Follow SES framework aim ‘dissect and harness complexity’; boosted regression trees.

• Social-ecological and governance context, norms and bottom-up social pressures key.

• Context, incentives eclipse knowledge, cognitions for some pro-environmental actions.

Abstract

Encouraging pro-environmental behavior is an urgent global challenge. An interdisciplinary framework covering governance, economic, social, ecological, and psychological dimensions is required to understand the salient features that encourage pro-environmental outcomes within and across contexts. We apply the Ostrom social-ecological systems framework to model voluntary investments by members of civil society into the aquatic environment. Using a data set of 1,809 angling clubs managing water bodies for fish stocking and habitat management in Germany and France, we show that a small set of factors, most crucially social-ecological and governance context as well as social norms and other bottom-up social pressures, drive environmental investments. These factors appear to override behavioral influences from psychological variables of the decision-maker. By contrast, the contextual setting related to property rights, size of the resource system, and social expectations were found to be strongly related to behavioral decisions, highlighting that the social-ecological context as well as incentives may be more important than knowledge and cognitions in driving certain pro-environmental actions.

Introduction

A key challenge of our time is to achieve sustainable development, a challenge composed of multi-faceted issues operating across varying geographical and political scales (Kates et al., 2001, Rockström et al., 2009). Encouraging investment into the environment is critical, yet difficult to achieve as people tend to fail to appropriately value natural capital (Fenichel et al., 2016), have disincentivizing ecological mental models (von Lindern, 2010), or simply lack political or financial power due to other higher order constraints (Fischer et al., 2012). Understanding public drivers of investments by civil society into environmental goods and services is of utmost concern because the sustainability challenges of our time ultimately depend on behavior by members of civil society (Ehrlich and Ehrlich, 2013, Fischer et al., 2012).

To learn and share knowledge about sustainability issues both between and across cases, contexts, regions and countries, a common language is required so that science can produce a cross-cutting body of knowledge and provide empirically grounded recommendations for sustainability (Ostrom, 2005, Ostrom, 2009). The Ostrom framework for the sustainability of social-ecological systems (SES) (McGinnis and Ostrom, 2014, Ostrom, 2007, Ostrom, 2009) has emerged as an interdisciplinary lingua franca for the analysis of the sustainability of common pool resources (Hinkel et al., 2014, Leslie et al., 2015, Partelow 2018). Being structural in orientation, the SES framework helps to disassemble and compartmentalize complex SESs into pieces that can be compared across systems and understood across disciplines (Ostrom, 2009) while explicitly taking into account hierarchies, feedbacks, and connections that are characteristic of coupled SESs (Berkes and Folke, 1998).

The Ostrom SES framework proposes a rich, yet tractable set of hypothesis-driven factors and variables that influence individual and collective behavior (called second-tier variables) characterizing key structural domains (called first-tier variables, e.g.: resource system, resource units, governance system, actors) that are believed to exert systematic impacts on sustainability outcomes across cases (SI Fig. 1) (Hinkel et al., 2014, McGinnis and Ostrom, 2014). The central and largely unresolved academic challenge is to apply the list of second-tier factors across large sets of cases and in turn examine whether specific factors or groups of factors exert generic impacts on resource sustainability or components of it across case studies (Hinkel et al., 2014).

While there have been guides for formalization and structural comparison of SESs using the Ostrom SES framework (Basurto et al., 2013, Gutiérrez et al., 2011, Hinkel et al., 2014, Leslie et al., 2015, Schlüter et al., 2014), a large-N quantitative application of the latest version of the framework to understand predictors of environment-directed decision making at the framework’s focal unit of analysis, the ‘action situation’ (Hinkel et al., 2014), is currently lacking (Partelow, 2018). This is of core interest in the sustainability sciences (Hinkel et al., 2014) to rigorously examine whether and how a large set of possible determinants of environmental decisions exert impacts on sustainability outcomes. Our paper is in response to this challenge.

The intended practical value of the SES framework is to help the analyst understand which second-tier variables exert systematic effects across cases on individual and collective behavior on the micro or macro-level (Hinkel et al., 2014) to provide needed information on “microsituational” as well as broad contextual variables and how they affect real-world outcomes (Vollan and Ostrom, 2010). Such understanding can only be achieved through a rigorous application of the same comprehensive set of second-tier variables to a range of social-ecological contexts (Hinkel et al., 2014, Thiel et al., 2015). Our goals are twofold: a) to test the explanatory power of the Ostrom SES framework for a specific resource investment decision in fisheries that involves decisions around stocking and alternative management approaches that enhance habitats, and b) understand whether a specific set of variables has explanatory power for environmental decisions. Our research analyses a wide range of behaviourally relevant social, economic and psychological factors that might affect how decision-makers invest into natural resources. Our work, by using a case from voluntary investments into natural resources, ultimately contributes to a relevant debate on the relative impact of incentives, constraints and psychological disposition of decision-makers on pro-environmental behavior (Basurto et al., 2016, Byerly et al., 2018, Osbaldiston and Schott, 2011). To specify boundaries for analysis the most recent version of the SES framework defines the core unit of investigation as an action situation (derived from the Institutional Analysis and Development framework) (McGinnis and Ostrom, 2014, Ostrom, 2005), where individuals interact with inputs (e.g., resource units) given exogenous variables (e.g., available actions, costs, benefits, deterrents), resulting in micro-level outcomes (e.g. change of a harvest regulation in fisheries) that feed back into the system and ultimately drive system-level sustainability and its indicators (e.g., overharvest, biodiversity loss, equity, resilience; SI Appendix Table S1). A given SES has many simultaneously interacting action situations, thus one strategy is to study the interactions and processes that lead to specific micro-level outcomes that have decisive roles for system sustainability. For example in fisheries, fish stocking constitutes an important micro-level managerial outcome that is prevalent in many fisheries-management contexts (Lorenzen et al., 2012). Stocking of fish desired by fisheries stakeholders is pervasive and global in nature, and could contribute both to the maintenance of threatened populations and enhance catches, while at the same time potentially affecting wild fishes or other organisms through undesired processes such as competition, predation or genetic hybridization (Eby et al., 2006, Laikre et al., 2010, van Poorten et al., 2011). Thus, understanding the factors that determine whether and with which intensity decision makers engage in fish stocking or alternative investments into natural resources is of high relevance for sustainability in fisheries.