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Responses to nature conservation challenges should incorporate transdisciplinary approaches, and there is growing research interest in behaviour change insights and interventions. However, there are knowledge gaps relating to promotion of conservation behaviours and how broader systems shape intervention effectiveness. This further compounds situations where practitioners implementing conservation programs may be ill-equipped to develop and implement behaviour change interventions. Our researcher-practitioner collaboration focuses on conservation policy in Victoria, Australia, with a specific focus on human relationships with nature. Drawing from this perspective, we outline how conservation behaviour change can be meaningfully integrated into policy and programs. Specifically, we detail how to embed research and systems-thinking approaches within program implementation to achieve conservation objectives and address knowledge gaps pertaining to behavioural science for nature, focusing on engaging communities. We articulate key themes and steps that are needed for transdisciplinary research to be impactful for conservation outcomes, including establishing a decision framework with clear objectives and a monitoring protocol. In implementing programs and research associated with our policy context, we have identified research gaps including several socio-psychological questions important to developing effective behaviour change interventions, as well as the need to identify pathways from incremental to transformative system change. In considering both research gaps and policy implementation, we outline ideas for how behavioural science can be undertaken in a way that is sympathetic to the systems in which they occur. As part of this, we examine how transdisciplinary collaboration can realise desired changes to biodiversity through a behavioural approach.
Eeden et al. (Wed,) studied this question.