An extension of the Theory of Planned Behavior to predict willingness to pay for the conservation of an urban park.

This paper relates the concept of moral obligation and the components of the Theory of Planned Behavior to determine their influence on the willingness to pay of visitors for park conservation. The sample consists of 190 visitors to an urban Spanish park. The mean willingness to pay estimated was 12.67€ per year. The results also indicated that moral norm was the major factor in predicting behavioral intention, followed by attitudes. The new relations established between the components of the Theory of Planned Behavior show that social norms significantly determine the attitudes, moral norms and perceived behavioral control of individuals. The proportion of explained variance shows that the inclusion of moral norms improves the explanatory power of the original model of the Theory of Planned Behavior (32-40%). Community-based social marketing and local campaigns are the main strategies that should be followed by land managers with the objective of promoting responsible, pro-environmental attitudes as well as a greater willingness to pay for this type of goods.

Theory of Planned Behavior and the Value-Belief-Norm Theory explaining willingness to pay for a suburban park.

This paper analyses whether the environmental profile of park visitors as defined by the components of the Theory of Planned Behavior and the Value-Belief-Norm Theory, determines their willingness to pay for park conservation. The sample consists of 194 visitors to a suburban Spanish park. Under these theories, it is shown that positive attitudes, a strong orientation towards biospheric and altruistic values with strong pro-environmental and normative beliefs determine the visitors' willingness to pay. Various fit statistics and the proportion of explained variance reveal that Theory of Planned Behavior has a greater influence on willingness to pay. The managers of urban spaces should direct their efforts to obtaining greater knowledge of people's attitudes, beliefs and pro-environmental values given their importance in their decisions regarding economic valuation of this sort of resources.

The role of satisfaction and emotional response in the choice mechanisms of suburban natural-areas users.

The unique observations and experiences of users of suburban natural areas lead them to perceive their surroundings in a manner associated with their personal values. It follows that every individual has a unique cognitive decision-making structure. This paper examines users' affective and cognitive evaluation of a particular suburban natural area by applying the means-end chain method to reveal the cognitive mechanism by which users link the attributes and benefits of an environmental public good with their own personal values. Analysis of a survey conducted of visitors to a Spanish suburban natural area (park) reveals the main attributes to be the opportunity to practice sports and proximity of the park and the main potential benefits to be the improvement of physical and psychological well-being. The desired personal values include fun, quality of life and self-fulfillment at the individual level and improved social relationships at the collective level. The paper also tests for cross-group, cognitive-structure differences in visitor groups, segmented by level of satisfaction and reported range of emotions, and finds that perceived physical and psychological health improvements and individual and social awareness increase with higher levels of satisfaction and emotional response. Therefore, the recommendations for natural area management suggested by these findings include enhancing the scenic beauty and peacefulness of suburban natural areas in order to improve the affective state of visitors because this could contribute to reducing social costs (including health care) within the area of influence of the natural area.