Search the Internet for publications dealing with "conservation" and "behavior" and you get a flurry of primary research papers (many highly cited) and scholarly books dealing with the importance of animal behavioral research for species conservation. Now add "human" to the search, and you get far, far fewer items, especially primary research. This is unsurprising. Conservation science has its roots in wildlife management, fisheries and forestry and those roots are very strong. In universities all over the world, conservation science is treated epistemologically and institutionally as a subdiscipline of biology. But things are changing. Most conservation scientists and practitioners acknowledge that the grand challenges for conserving biodiversity in the 21st century lie in production landscapes—the places where humans work and live. Protected areas, while hugely important for the conservation effort, are inadequate for stemming the rate of degradation of nature and the associated extinction of species. While not without its controversy, this shift in emphasis from pristine to production landscapes has the potential to elevate conservation science from a discipline that documents, exhorts and complains, to one that can provide global leadership on how the conservation of nature and its services are essential for the persistence of the human endeavor. In production landscapes, humans and their activities are the unambiguous lords over nature. It is their behavior, predicated on their choices, which determines the fate of ecosystems and their associated species. Conservation seeks to influence these choices through the integration of biodiversity considerations into the decision making of individuals and institutions. This activity goes under the rubric of "mainstreaming". The Global Environment Facility (GEF), the World's largest mechanism for funding biodiversity conservation, will have supported between 2004 and 2014, a total of 327 mainstreaming projects, totaling US$1,631,684,477 in GEF funding and US$5,249,734,936 in cofinancing. Do an Internet search for research papers on the topic of biodiversity mainstreaming; it produces almost nothing. How can it be that conservation scientists have failed to conduct research on a topic that has been identified as a major instrument for biodiversity conservation in production landscapes? Because mainstreaming conservation is fundamentally about engendering pro-conservation behavior. Conservation science has largely failed to embrace the notion that the study of human choice about nature conservation is potentially the most important research topic in the world of today. So what can be done? I believe that conservation science needs to look to economics for salvation—not to neoclassical economics that is still taught in most universities, but to behavioral economics, the vibrant, quirky and real-world discipline that is rapidly gaining ascendency. In short, conservation science needs behavioral conservation, and it needs it now. Neoclassical economics has underpinned the neoliberal revolution that emerged in the Thatcher–Reagan era of the 1980s. Neoclassical economists assume that humans behave rationally when confronted with decisions about maximizing financial gains. As logical extensions of the Homo economicus mindset, markets are also assumed to behave rationally, ever adjusting to financial perturbations in a way that sustains economic growth. Let the markets be, and we will all get richer. Of course, this is nonsense. There is no such beast as H. economicus, markets can collapse spectacularly and economic growth that fails to consider environmental externalities will surely bring the World to its knees. Intriguingly, humans find the blather of neoclassical economics attractive. It resonates with our Pleistocene brains, hard-wired to maximize foraging returns in the short-term, because the longer-term (i.e., tomorrow) was (and is) too replete with uncertainties to take seriously. However, the situation in which humans find themselves in the 21st century is very different from that which existed on South Africa's Agulhas coast where our cognition emerged some 160,000 years ago. And we have to learn to adapt to our contemporary circumstances, grossly different as they are to those that wired our brains. In order to survive, we have to—as Herman Daly so presciently said—eschew continuous economic growth by embracing three anathemas: redistribute wealth within and among nations, control population growth, and reduce consumption. In other words, we are going to have to change our individual and collective behaviors—and radically so. Conservationists, therefore, need to get serious about human behavior by following the cue of behavioral economists. This synergy of psychology and economics studies how economic decisions of individuals and institutions are influenced by cognitive, emotional, and social factors. What is required is the rapid emergence of behavioral conservation, a discipline based on the fusion of psychology and conservation. We need to understand what choices we make, how we use and abuse nature and why we do this. Only then can we design strategies to influence these choices in ways that are positive for conservation. Or perhaps we will find that influencing behavior in certain contexts is simply impossible. At least we will know not to squander scarce resources on projects that are doomed to fail. Over the past few decades, conservation scientists have been very smart at designing optimal, efficient and cost-effective solutions for conservation problems. Overall, the adoption of these solutions by humans has been less than dismal. Why? I think our failure is largely a consequence of our lack of understanding of the real preferences that we and our institutions have when confronted with making sacrifices in favor of nature conservation. It's that Pleistocene brain at work. Given the environmental crises that we face, that brain needs to be rewired, something which is thankfully possible. Behavioral conservation is the science that will get us there. Thanks to Shirley Pierce and Andrew Knight for their insightful comments on this essay.
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Richard M. Cowling (2014) studied this question.