(Photo by iStock/corradobarattaphotos)
Ask most conservationists to talk about their impact, and you’ll hear stories of forests protected, of species saved, or of new technologies making a difference. But if you take a step back from those outcomes, conservation has always been about people and their behavior, about those choices we’ve all made that have led to the biodiversity crisis we now face. That makes behavior change essential to the work conservationists do: Shifting people away from actions that drive biodiversity loss and toward those that sustain nature. And let’s face it: Despite important successes, we haven’t shifted behavior at the scale or pace the crisis demands.
Conservation as a field has long drawn from the natural sciences to guide strategy and to decide which behaviors need changing, but it has been slower to fully embrace what behavioral science teaches about changing behavior reliably and effectively. This isn’t because behavioral science doesn’t work. It’s transforming public health, finance, and even climate action with measurable results. But conservationists face a particular set of hurdles that makes applied behavioral science particularly hard: Measuring outcomes can be more resource-intensive than in other fields, biodiversity-related outcomes may be challenging to prove and take time to materialize, and our funding opportunities and incentives don’t always align with maximizing these impacts.
Yet, the fact that applying behavioral science in conservation is hard shouldn’t be an excuse not to do it. If anything, it would be reckless not to. And that’s a view that is increasingly acknowledged across the board. The encouraging news is that other fields can teach us valuable lessons about overcoming these hurdles. If we’re willing to learn from their hard-won lessons, we can start closing that gap.
The solution? We need to change our own behavior. Here are four things we as a field can start doing today:
1. Get behavioral science out of the silo.
Conservation work—whether it’s conveying nature’s value to policymakers, empowering communities through social marketing campaigns, or enforcing protected areas—is behavior change work.
Yet, despite this recognition by major conservation groups and the growing number of “nudge units” making their way into conservation organizations, we still tend to treat behavior change as a structurally independent silo. This means that even when organizations have behavioral expertise in-house or work directly with external experts, those professionals tend to be consulted late in project development rather than being involved throughout. Behavior change expertise can also end up competing with core delivery priorities (for example, by insisting on pre-intervention research when a tight timeline didn’t account for it) due to a lack of formal, established mandate from the start. This produces predictable friction and frequently limits behavioral scientists to tinkering at the margins of wider projects or programs.
The sooner we see every aspect of our work through the lens of behavior change, the quicker we can make the shift. Take the Ministry for the Environment in Aotearoa, New Zealand: In 2021, it established a systems change and capability team to embed behavioral science across its workflows. That is, they tried to create the conditions for the entire ministry to see itself as a behavior change organization, rather than an organization that, among other things, runs behavior change projects.
Unfortunately, this promising approach was cut short in a change of government before it could fully mature. Yet, this kind of integration was exactly what Michael Hallsworth, chief behavioral scientist at the Behavioural Insights Team, would advocate for when discussing the next generation of applied behavioral science. Instead of building a single “fancy room” (i.e., a nudge unit) that does behavioral science within our organizations, we should upgrade the “wiring of our entire house.” When behavioral science is embedded at the core of organizational structure, it produces benefits regardless of shifting priorities. That means fewer late-stage redesigns, clearer measurement and success expectations, and an organizational culture that makes effective behavior change business-as-usual.
Conservation organizations like ours can work this way too. At Rare, behavior-change expertise is embedded within the different programs, while the NGO also maintains the Center for Behavior and the Environment as a central knowledge hub. TRAFFIC takes a similar approach, with its Social and Behaviour Change team supporting practitioners who bring local knowledge to key countries, all focused on pro-biodiversity behaviors. This is catching on even with major funders like the Global Environment Facility, which now requires projects to embed behavior change throughout their work.
2. Standardize the tools and language.
Conservation attracts behavioral scientists from diverse fields: psychology, economics, social marketing, sociology, etc. This diversity enriches our understanding, yet each discipline’s distinct terminology creates fundamental communication barriers. Just consider the many ways we describe failing to act on good intentions: is it “intention-action gaps,” “attitude-behavior gaps,” “value-action gaps,” or “knowledge-attitude-practice gaps?”
If we look at other fields where applied behavioral science thrives, a unifying theme is common language around the models and frameworks used to analyze behavior, as well as the tools to change it. For example, most behavioral scientists in other fields know the COM-B model (Capability, Opportunity, Motivation—Behavior) that originated in public health before making its way to finance, development, climate, etc. Having an integrative model that allows for both deductive and inductive reasoning in a shared language helps people learn from one another and build upon what others were doing.
By contrast, conservation lacks widely adopted, field-wide behavior change frameworks. Individual organizations develop their own models and processes, reinventing the wheel rather than converging on common diagnostic approaches, intervention taxonomies, or evaluation methodologies. This fragmentation has cut us off from advances in the broader behavioral sciences, leaving us defaulting to theories like the Theory of Planned Behavior, which struggles to explain why people with good intentions still fail to act. Without shared frameworks to guide us from diagnosis to intervention, we often work backwards—selecting familiar tools like social marketing campaigns or workshops before understanding what’s actually driving the behavior we want to change. When interventions fail, we struggle to learn why, lacking the standardized measures needed to identify which factors reliably predict change.
The good news? This gap is finally being recognized. We’re beginning to see standardized tools and frameworks emerge. Just recently, the IUCN SSC–CEC Behaviour Change Task Force completed a global needs assessment to see where and how they could accelerate the adoption of behavioral science in biodiversity work, and groups like IUCN or the Conservation Measures Partnership are perfectly positioned to steward shared taxonomies across the field. Professional bodies, like the Society for Conservation Biology and the Institution of Environmental Sciences, are also vital to help connect researchers and practitioners. Converging on shared frameworks and connecting our fragmented networks will go a long way in bringing clarity, comparability, and rigor to our work.
3. Make evaluation non-negotiable.
In fields like behavioral finance, public health, and even development, rigorous evaluation is non-negotiable. Interventions aren’t considered complete until their outcomes are measured and understood. Clear metrics (like spending, profits, lives) drive incentives to minimize costs and maximize benefits, with little assumed about impact.
Conservation, in contrast, often stops at activity or outreach delivery because that is the incentive structure we have: funders put an emphasis on the delivery of activities and outreach rather than the impact that this achieves. As a result, we track outputs obsessively (workshops delivered, materials distributed) but rarely measure whether anyone actually changed their behavior.
But conservation is entering its own “causal revolution”: more initiatives are conducting actual experimental or quasi-experimental impact evaluations. A recent study perfectly illustrates why this matters. Researchers tested whether paying Indonesian fishers to release accidentally caught endangered sharks would reduce mortality, using a randomized controlled trial. Traditional monitoring suggested success: hundreds of sharks were being released. But when compared to a meaningful counterfactual, the truth emerged: the program actually increased hammerhead mortality by 44 percent. The payments had inadvertently incentivized fishers to catch more sharks to earn release payments. They were releasing more because they were actively catching more. Without experimental design, this perverse incentive would have gone undetected.
This is exactly the kind of honest reckoning we need for our work. It’s not that incentive programs can’t work; it’s that we need rigorous methods to understand when an intervention like this helps or harms. Yet evaluation is routinely dismissed as an unnecessary expense or time sink, with projects claiming there’s “no budget” for “complex” evaluation. We need to reframe this: Evaluation is an investment that prevents us from wasting our already-limited resources on interventions that do nothing or, at worst, are actively harmful.
Moreover, if we build robust, outcome-based, and method-appropriate evaluation into every budget from the start, we could unlock new funding opportunities. For example, outcomes-linked finance mechanisms, which tie repayment to verified outcomes, have historically avoided behavior change initiatives, viewing them as too difficult to measure. But the issue isn’t behavior change; it’s simply a reflection of our field’s weak evaluation practices. By demonstrating clear, measurable outcomes through counterfactual methods, we could tap into these innovative financing mechanisms, as is already done for results of a more “physical” nature (such as hectares saved, carbon sequestered, etc.).
4. Look upstream in the system.
Individual behavior matters—but it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Too often, we burden frontline communities (fishers, farmers, forest users) with behavior change expectations while leaving the systems constraining their choices untouched. A fisher can’t adopt sustainable methods if markets only reward destructive practices. And even when individuals change despite these barriers, such changes are unlikely to persist or scale without systemic reform.
When faced with systemic barriers, we often accept them as fixed and continue working with frontline communities to achieve whatever change is possible within those constraints. But systems aren’t fixed. They’re made of people making decisions. The policymaker drafting fishing regulations, the buyer setting procurement standards, the banker approving agricultural loans—they all contribute to the constraints we bemoan. Like the communities we work with, they’re driven by incentives, influenced by social pressures, and subject to cognitive biases. Which means we can design interventions for them too.
In conservation, this could mean applying behavioral insights to align legislators’ voting behavior with the priorities of their constituents, making the behavior of upstream actors more transparent for all to “see,” or even helping conservationists navigate their own decision biases. It can also mean working at multiple levels of a system at once: In Tanzania, efforts to tackle the bushmeat crisis have combined policy reform, better value-chain enforcement for sellers, and community engagement all into one program. This led to significant reductions in poaching while ensuring changes persist. Rare’s work with small-scale fishers also exemplifies this approach: not only working directly with fishers to promote sustainable practices, but also collaborating with local leaders to advocate for fishers’ rights, and with financial institutions and the private sector to build economic resilience.
A wider, systems-thinking lens can help conservationists identify all the leverage points that shape behavior before jumping to interventions. Behavioral systems mapping is particularly useful here, as it allows us to map current and expected outcomes, the different actors involved, barriers and motivators, as well as the intervention tools at our teams’ disposal so we can pinpoint where behavior change interventions can have the greatest impact.
Knowing Isn’t Enough
Conservation stands at an inflection point. We’ve watched behavioral science transform other fields with measurable results, while we’ve struggled to demonstrate its impact—undermining our credibility and our effectiveness. But the path forward is clear, drawn from real solutions other fields have already implemented.
The challenge is that knowing about these solutions isn’t enough. Behavioral science reminds us that good intentions don’t automatically translate into action—we need to create the conditions for change. For conservation, that starts with accountability. Right now, success is defined less by how well we save nature and more by whether we secure funding. That must change. If we’re serious about impact, incentives need to push resources toward interventions that work and away from those that don’t, as they do in the private sector and other fields where behavioral science thrives.
Redefining success means rewarding projects that maximize real-world impact, pivoting when needed, and stopping interventions that aren’t working. We can do this by embedding behavioral science throughout organizations, by researchers and practitioners adopting shared frameworks that build on each other’s work, by funders making evaluation non-negotiable, and by all of us looking upstream to the systems that shape behavior.
It’s ironic—and fitting—that the key to stronger behavioral science in conservation is changing our own behavior first. But conservation has always been about people and the decisions they make. That includes us.
Read more stories by Philipe M. Bujold, Gayle Burgess & Lucia A. Reisch.