556 F. Dobson et al.
their network. However, this approach still resembles the first type of flagship campaign defined above, with the ma- jority of benefits going to the specific conservation area. Another approach could be to adopt the second flagship campaign type, using specific conservation areas as the symbol of campaigns designed to tackle issues that affect broader conservation area networks. These issues include improving management effectiveness, governance and equi- ty at the site level, and increasing ecological representative- ness and connectivity at the network level (Maxwell et al., 2020). Increased resourcing and political support to address these issues would allow conservation areas to fulfil their key roles of conserving biodiversity and maintaining eco- system services. This suggests that there would be many benefits to devel-
oping campaigns that use conservation area-based flagships. However, this is hindered by the fact that unlike for flagship species, we know little about the factors that drive donor preferences for conservation areas (Veríssimo et al., 2011; Lundberg et al., 2019). Here, we address this by using a choice experiment to investigate which attributes of con- servation areas are likely to appeal to a target audience of UK-based donors. Choice experiments provide insight into how people value goods and services (Louviere & Hensher, 1982), and have been widely used to investigate the prefer- ences of donors for different types of conservation projects (Morse-Jones et al., 2012; Zander et al., 2014; Garnett et al., 2018; Lewis et al., 2018) and of various stakeholder groups for flagship species (Veríssimo et al., 2009, 2013). Our study focused on the preferences ofUK residents for
a selection of attributes related to hypothetical conservation areas in South Africa. The UK was chosen because its popu- lation provides a large pool of potential donors: the UK population participates strongly in charitable giving com- pared to other countries (CAF, 2018) and nearly 10%of the UK’s adult population are members of an environmental organization (Cracknell et al., 2013). We chose conservation areas in South Africa because the country is relatively fa- miliar to this UK target audience (Statistics South Africa, 2020) and well-known for its landscape-scale conservation (Lindsey et al., 2007). We used choice experiments to iden- tify the most important conservation area attributes, to- gether with multinomial logit and latent class modelling to assess how much people are willing to pay for the pres- ence of different conservation area attributes and whether their preferences are affected by their socio-economic char- acteristics (Hensher et al., 2015).
Methods
Choice experiment design In a choice experiment, respondents are presented with groups of two or more scenarios that are described by
differing levels of a set of attributes. Respondents choose their preferred scenario from each group and the relative value placed on each attribute is then calculated from their aggregated responses (Veríssimo et al., 2009). A monetary variable can also be included to facilitate the calculation of willingness to pay values; this is the amount respondents are willing to give up for a step change in the level of each attribute (Mangham et al., 2009). Although there can be a disconnect between hypothetical willingness to pay values and the amount people would give in reality, they provide a good indication of relative preferences. Stated choice experiments are an effective method to understand real preferences (Louviere et al., 2000). We used a choice experiment to assess which attributes
of conservation areas drive donor preferences. Through an online questionnaire, we presented respondents with a se- ries of paired hypothetical conservation areas, each of which had differing levels of a specific set of attributes (Table 1). For each pair, we asked respondents to choose the area they would rather donate to in aid of its protection. We labelled the conservation areas A and B to prevent label bias (Veríssimo et al., 2009) and described all areas to be in South Africa, to control for respondents associating the areas with local sites, which could introduce biases such as sentimental value. Each area was associated with a donation amount to calculate willingness to pay values. We did not include a ‘no choice’ option to prevent respondents from earning their reward without weighing up the alternatives, but respondents were informed they were free to stop at any point if the choice-making became too difficult. We also did this because studies have found that respon- dents disproportionately choose the ‘no choice’ alternative (Meyerhoff&Liebe, 2009), especially when faced with com- plex choices (Boxall et al., 2009), which restricts one’s ability to assess aggregate trade-offs between attributes. Designing an effective choice experiment requires care-
ful selection of relevant attributes and associated levels (Mangham et al., 2009). Conservation areas have a variety of characteristics that we could have tested, but including too many variables in a choice experiment places a heavy cognitive burden on respondents and can produce unreli- able results (Mangham et al., 2009). Hence, we selected attributes through: (1) a literature review to identify conser- vation area attributes with the potential to influence prefer- ences, (2) discussing the suitability of these attributes with conservation practitioners working for the NGO BirdLife International, and (3) assessing the shortlist for feasibility in terms of being able to split them into a small number of levels. For example, habitat type within the conservation area (such as a wetland, tropical forest or grassland) was originally identified as an important attribute, but was not feasible to include in the choice experiment because there are many different types of habitat, and a single area can include multiple habitat types.
Oryx, 2022, 56(4), 555–563 © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605321000259
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