Title: re: Linking knowledge to action in collaborative conservation
A very important article - where does all the research end up if not with practitioners? And if it does not end up practitioners then what is the use of it? These questions make it vitally important not just to do the research but also to find ways of implementing the research. The findings of the paper were that the ability to, and willingness to use information is dependent on relationships and dialogue, making this and issue of increasing communication between participants. The next problem is how to implement these findings. In psychology this often comes down to motivation – how to motivate individuals to engage in certain behaviours. No easy task – if it were, there would be no lifestyle related health or environmental issues. In psychology there are several forms of motivation, the most common being reward and punishment. However this method has proven inefficient, with mainly short benefits if any. A more positive form of motivation is ‘approach motivation’.
Approach motivation focuses on ways of encouraging individuals to want to do something. For example fining individuals (punishment) for having weeds on their property may not work as well as by engaging individuals to want to take part in caring for their community. At the recent weeds conference in Cairns this year, a delegate asked a presenter (Professor Ghosh from India) what policy they have in place to ensure that individual land holders do their part in controlling weeds on their property. Professor Gosh replied that there were no policies in place forcing people to control weeds on their property – instead individual land holders wanted to, as part of their responsibility to the community and neighbouring land holders.