The interaction of financial incentives and social norms to motivate conservation on the Tibetan Plateau

Recent years have seen both increased use of financial incentives to promote conservation behavior, and increased interest in understanding how social norms can be utilized to encourage conservation. However, there remains limited understanding of how norms and incentives interact to affect people’s willingness to undertake incentivized behaviors. We advance existing research, testing aspects of a theory of social norms and financial incentives to predict and explain conservation behavior. We study a population of ethnically Tibetan pastoralists in Qinghai, China, an area of critical conservation importance both for its role as the source of the drinking water supply for over a billion people downstream and for its ecosystems (including wildlife), where financial incentives for conservation have been introduced. We examine how local yak herders respond to a hypothetical program to reduce their herd size in exchange for a monetary incentive. Appealing to descriptive social norms in favor of joining the program motivates increased participation, and it reduces the likelihood of reversing the herd size reduction when the program ends. However, as the payment size increases, the effect of norms diminishes. Our findings indicate that cultural factors – in this case religious orientation against treating animals as a commodity – can be a stronger motivator than social norms.