Dr Louise Blackmore. Trust, competitive program design, and collaboration.

Abstract: It is increasingly recognised that collaborative private land conservation programs could deliver improved biodiversity outcomes, whilst generating other economic and social benefits. Collaborative landholder behaviour is likely to be affected by trust relationships between potential collaborators. Increasingly, private land conservation programs employ competitive tendering to distribute funding, which is thought to improve cost-effectiveness. Combining collaboration with tendering could allow agencies to achieve landscape-scale benefits in a cost-effective way. However, whether this is a useful prospect in reality depends on how trust relationships and program design interact to affect collaboration. This study reports on the results of controlled laboratory experiments where subjects participated in one of two versions of a simulated collaborative conservation program: a non-competitive flat-rate scheme, and a competitive tender. Subjects interacted with an unknown, a trusted or a distrusted partner. In both program types, trusting pairs collaborated more than distrusting pairs. However, unknown pairs collaborated far more than their distrusting counterparts in the flat-rate program, in contrast to the tender, where unknown and distrusting pairs were statistically indistinguishable. This suggests that people view collaboration with an unknown partner as equivalent to collaboration with a distrusted partner in competitive tenders, but not in a non-competitive flat-rate environment. If these findings apply in the field, conservation agencies might expect collaboration rates to be greater in trusting than in distrusting populations, in accordance with intuition and previous work. However, in communities where prospective collaborators do not know one another well, collaboration could be very sensitive to whether the program has a competitive or non-competitive design.

Видео Dr Louise Blackmore. Trust, competitive program design, and collaboration. автора Путешествия времен