Conservation has no shortage of ambitious policy. Marine protected areas now cover roughly 8% of the world’s oceans. Protected lands account for nearly a fifth of the planet’s terrestrial surface. Community forest concessions span millions of hectares across the tropics. On paper, the progress is striking. Yet conservationists have long warned about “paper parks”: protected areas that exist in law but not in practice, after the legislation passes, boundaries are gazetted and rules changed, but the wildlife, fish and forests do not recover because the human behavior those rules depend on never shift. Paper parks illustrate something conservationists have learned the hard way: structural reform is necessary, but rarely sufficient. Structural reform sets the rules, but behavioral dynamics determine whether those rules become a functioning system — or a paper park. This problem sits at the center of a debate sparked by Nick Chater and George Loewenstein’s recent book, It’s On You: How Corporations and Behavioral Scientists Have Convinced Us That We’re to Blame for Society’s Deepest Problems. Both authors are leading behavioral scientists, part of a field that studies how people actually make decisions and respond to incentives, drawing on insights from economics, psychology and related disciplines. Their critique targets what they call the “i-frame”: interventions that try to change individual behavior within existing systems, like reminder messages, information campaigns and default settings. Corporations and policymakers, they argue, often prefer this approach because it shifts attention away from structural reforms that might threaten powerful interests. The alternative is the…This article was originally published on Mongabay

From Conservation news via This RSS Feed.