Using Behavioral Science to Increase Women’s Participation in Natural ResourceManagement in Mexico

Natural resources management (NRM) helps protect forests and promote sustainable development.Although women are key in strengthening activities in NRM, they are dramatically underrepresented in public funding forforest projects in many countries, such as Mexico, limiting their participation and impact. While structural barriers,such as land tenure and low capacity, cause this problem, this is exacerbated by barriers such as lack of information,complex application processess, gender norms, and rural women’s low aspirations and limited agency and self-efficacyto participate in NRM projects. This paper tests whether additions and modifications to the standard outreachstrategies of a call for proposals for NRM grants in Mexico increase the number of applications submitted by localitiesand the share of women participating. The study uses a randomized controlled trial in 113 rural localities, wherethe standard outreach approach (control) is complemented with additional information channels and simplifiedmaterials (treatment 1), aiming to appeal more directly to inexperienced populations. A second treatment group furthermodifies the informational materials using insights from behavioral science (loss aversion, norms framing, andothers) and adds proactive text message reminders to prompt behavior (treatment 2), hoping to address the barriers towomen’s participation. The results suggest that treatment 1 localities had, on average, 2.3 more applications perlocality than the control group (increasing the participation of both men and women). Treatment 2complemented this, having, on average, 6.4 more women per locality participating of these applications than intreatment 1. This shows that women manifested interest in participating in these activities. A representative surveyof women in the study localities (1,485 women in 52 localities) suggests that women in treatment localities weremore likely to recognize the name of the project or informational materials. The analysis also suggests that thecomplementary strategies had no effect on the likelihood of being selected to receive a grant under the project,suggesting that additional support is needed to translate this increased interest into successful applications thatwould allow participation in NRM.