Relationship‐building sometimes helps and sometimes hinders the spread of conservation initiatives

Abstract The spread of conservation initiatives often depends on patterns of social interactions among conservation actors. With this in mind, conservation practitioners often invest in social networking and outreach, under the assumption that the creation of new relationships will enhance the spread of conservation programs. Here, we test this assumption by modeling the diffusion of a conservation practice across two social networks of conservation actors. For two common models of information spread (the independent cascade and linear threshold models), we investigated whether and how the addition of new social relationships (i.e., network edges) altered the spread of conservation initiatives across the networks. Our results show that adding network connections is sometimes beneficial and sometimes counterproductive. Under the independent cascade model, increased connectivity generally facilitated broader adoption, particularly when actors were receptive to new practices. In some cases, adoption grew by more than 25% simply through the addition of new social relationships among actors. In contrast, under the linear threshold model, additional connections often hindered information diffusion. Given the dramatic differences in outcomes between linear threshold and independent cascade models, future work should determine which of these models better describes conservation networks. A key practical insight for conservation practitioners is that establishing a core group of early adopters (i.e., a larger number of initially active nodes) promotes overall adoption rates. Our results overall underscore the need for strategies to effectively allocate resources, design outreach strategies, and foster collaborative relationships that maximize the adoption of conservation initiatives.