Flagship conservation areas 561
project. Most notably, respondents in Group 1, who were most likely to be members of environmental organizations and less wealthy, were not interested in funding conser- vation areas (Table 2). This could be because they think conserving areas is less important than conserving species, which would explain why the presence of threatened species was their most preferred attribute (Fig. 2). Or it could be because they feel they already support this kind of activity through their environmental organization membership and cannot afford additional donations from their limited income. This suggests that NGOs need to clearly justify the need for funding beyond that provided by membership fees when developing flagship campaigns targeted at their members. Other studies have found that environmental organization membership does not necessarily increase will- ingness to pay for conservation activities (Baral et al., 2008), and although people may value biodiversity, they are not al- ways willing to pay for its conservation (Martín-López et al., 2007). This is less encouraging for using these flagships for fundraising; however, area-based flagship campaigns could still be successful for awareness raising and movement build- ing. For example, campaigns that target audiences such as those in Group 1 could focus on the importance of effective area-based conservation for threatened bird species. They could even aim to encourage people to mobilize and join en- vironmental movements that are pressuring governments to commit to ambitious action for nature (Jordan & Maloney, 1997).
Despite Group 1 members not being interested, the ma-
jority of respondents were willing to donate. Group 3 members were willing to pay the most (Fig. 3), which is understandable given they were likely to be wealthier than Group 2 members. However, the standard error on the willingness to pay estimates for Group 3 was large, so there was substantial variation in how much people were willing to give. This could be related to findings that wealthier peo- ple do not always see themselves as having more money to donate (Berman et al., 2020), so NGOs cannot assume that targeting a wealthier audience will automatically result in greater donations. Both Groups 2 and 3 valued community ownership the most (Fig. 2), suggesting that the idea of com- munities having agency and benefiting from conservation is appealing. Charismatic mammals were also important for Group 2, a group with members who were generally less educated, reinforcing the well-studied appeal of charismatic species to a wide range of people (Martín-López et al., 2007). Therefore, analysis of these two groups highlights the poten- tial of community ownership and, to a lesser extent, charis- matic mammals, as powerful marketing hooks for people who are less engaged with conservation. Campaigns could capitalize on these elements, telling stories about the area, focusing on the people from the communities involved, and describing the charismatic mammals that rely on its protection.
It is important to stress that designing a flagship cam-
paign involves many considerations other than selecting a site with themost attractive attributes. These include assess- ing the cultural, political or economic sensitivities related to the area and examining the context-specific relationship between the target audience and the conservation issue highlighted by the campaign (Veríssimo et al., 2011). For ex- ample, although South African conservation areas provided a good case study for this research, preferences may have differed if the areas had been described to be in another country. Our results should therefore be viewed as a contri- bution towards improving flagship approaches and not as a rigid description of the most effective flagship areas for aUK audience. There are, however, two broad findings with po- tentially high relevance for conservation. The first is that the majority of respondents showed a willingness to fund con- servation areas. This suggests that conservation areas that appeal to potential donors could be used effectively in two types of flagship campaign: to benefit the conservation area directly, or to act as the ‘face’ of broader campaigns to bene- fit conservation area networks. The second is that when making trade-offs in their choices, people relied more on conservation, social and pragmatic values than on aesthetic va- lues. In particular, these potential donors, especially thosewho were notmembers of environmental NGOs, seemed to be in- terestedinfunding areasownedandmanagedby communities. Our results suggest that diversifying the flagship concept
to include conservation areas has great potential to generate more support for wider biodiversity protection (Veríssimo et al., 2011), as these campaigns could appeal to new audi- ences, fund new types of projects and groups, and cover a wider range of species and ecosystems through site-based conservation. Our research is just the first step, however, and we need researchers and practitioners to co-develop work on how best to use these flagships to address issues that affect broader conservation area networks. In particu- lar, given the potentially high appeal of community-owned flagship conservation areas, care will be needed to ensure that spending patterns match campaign promises and funds are disbursed transparently and fairly. If designed well, flagship area campaigns could benefit all types of pro- tected areas and also other effective area-based conservation measures. This could help to meet targets for increasing the global extent of land and sea under conservation by sup- porting existing conservation areas and the creation and effective management of new ones (Jonas et al., 2014; Corrigan et al., 2018; Dudley et al., 2018).
Acknowledgements We thank the Durrell Institute for Con- servation and Ecology at the University of Kent for funding this research, and Stuart Butchart (BirdLife International) for advising on the choice experiment design.
Author contributions Study design: FD, RJS, IF; data collection: FD; analysis: FD, IF; writing: FD, RJS.
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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