| The alarming pace of habitat destruction necessitates development of innovative approaches for in situ biodiversity conservation. One option is the privately-owned nature reserve. Despite ongoing proliferation of privately-owned nature reserves and growing interest in them, we know little about this unusual conservation tool. I interviewed 68 private nature reserve owners in Costa Rica to learn more about privately-owned parks in that country. The study characterized the conservation role played by private nature reserves in Costa Rica, quantified the importance of various motives behind private nature reserve operation, and evaluated an incentives program designed to support operation of private reserves. On a more specific level, the study addressed five key hypotheses. First, it showed nature reserve owners to be motivated by a sense of stewardship more than any other factor. Second, it confirmed that private nature reserve owners possessed strong ecological orientations and attitudes, as indicated by scores on the New Ecological Paradigm scale. Third, it demonstrated how an incentive program might have affected landowner decision-making with respect to three theoretically-derived motivational domains. Fourth, it revealed how participants in a conservation incentive program felt that they were could better steward natural resources than reserve owners who were not participating in the program. Last, it documented that a developing country can expand and enhance its formal park system through use of conservation incentives.;On the broadest level, the study contributed to conservation theory in three ways. First, it checked the verisimilitude of a relatively new behavioral model for conservation of natural resources, confirming through factor analysis that legality, profitability, and social acceptability were important motivational domains for reserve owners. Second, it expanded this model by adding a fourth motivational domain relating to stewardship. Finally, the study deepened our understanding of land stewardship by presenting a conceptual model describing how landowners decide the amount of land to protect. The results should be of interest to researchers as well as practitioners, wherever biodiversity remains threatened and wherever new conservation partners are being sought. |
