Private land conservation decision-making: An integrative social science model.

Owners and managers of private lands make decisions that have implications well beyond the boundaries of their land, influencing species conservation, water quality, wildfire risk, and other environmental outcomes with important societal and ecological consequences. Understanding how these decisions are made is key for informing interventions to support better outcomes. However, explanations of the drivers of decision making are often siloed in social science disciplines that differ in focus, theory, methodology, and terminology, hindering holistic understanding. To address these challenges, we propose a conceptual model of private land conservation decision-making that integrates theoretical perspectives from three dominant disciplines: economics, sociology, and psychology. The model highlights how heterogeneity in behavior across decision-makers is driven by interactions between the decision context, attributes of potential conservation behaviors, and attributes of the decision-maker. These differences in both individual attributes and context shape decision-makers' constraints and the potential and perceived consequences of a behavior. The model also captures how perceived consequences are evaluated and weighted through a decision-making process that may range from systematic to heuristic, ultimately resulting in selection of a behavior. Outcomes of private land behaviors across the landscape feed back to alter the socio-environmental conditions that shape future decisions. The conceptual model is designed to facilitate better communication, collaboration, and integration across disciplines and points to methodological innovations that can expand understanding of private land decision-making. The model also can be used to illuminate how behavior change interventions (e.g., policies, regulations, technical assistance) could be designed to target different drivers to encourage environmentally and socially beneficial behaviors on private lands.

National monuments and economic growth in the American West.

National monuments in the United States are protected lands that contain historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, or other objects of historic or scientific interest. Their designations are often contentious. Opponents argue that monuments hurt local economies by limiting uses of public lands, while supporters counter that monuments create a new amenity-driven economy. We use panel data on all business establishments in the eight-state Mountain West region to estimate economic impacts of 14 monument designations over a 25-year period. We find that monuments increased the average number of establishments and jobs in areas near monuments; increased the average establishment growth rate; had no effect, positive or negative, on the number of jobs in establishments that existed pre-designation; and had no effect on mining and other industries that use public lands. On net, protecting lands as national monuments has been more help than hindrance to local economies in the American West.