Research articleExploring the influence of an extended theory of planned behaviour on preferences and willingness to pay for participatory natural resources management
Introduction
Environmental values are difficult to evaluate in economic terms because of their non-market nature, therefore stated preferences surveys are frequently used to assess individuals' preferences. Stated preference surveys elicit willingness to pay (WTP) of good not traded in the market place, which is then used as a measure of the value people attach to that specific good (Hanley and Barbier, 2009). Choice Experiments (CE) are amongst the most flexible stated preferences approach, because they are based on the evaluation of single attributes of a good or service and allow addressing a very large number of situations (Hanley et al., 2002). In a CE setting the relevant attributes and attribute levels of a good or service are combined to create different alternatives and respondents are asked to choose their preferred in a sequence of choice tasks (Hensher et al., 2015).
It has been observed that using some behavioural theory to explain heterogeneity in preferences contributes to improve model estimates (Fischer and Hanley, 2007). In the environmental field, the theory on environmental value orientations towards wildlife help explaining different levels of WTP for wolves, lynx and salamanders (Grilli et al., 2018), while the new ecological paradigm is a predictor for preferences for endangered species (Aldy et al., 2012). Social norms were also found to have a significant effect on environmental preferences (Jones et al., 2010). In this paper we contribute to the behavioural literature of choices by studying the effect of the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) on environmental preferences. A novel aspect of our approach is that we assumed that planned behaviour is a latent and unobservable characteristics of the human behaviour, which can only be approximated by some stated measures such as Likert scales. The most common alternative approach is the direct inclusion of these variables in the utility function (Hess and Stathopoulos, 2013), which is problematic for at least two reasons, i.e. measurement errors and correlation with the error term (Hoyos et al., 2015), because Likert-type variables are only proxies that are collected with some degrees of inaccuracy. To solve this issue, we implemented a hybrid mixed logit model (HMXL). The HMXL is a simultaneous equation model in which a latent variable is used as a predictor for TPB indicators and for the choice model, so that TPB and CE are linked by this latent variable. Despite some increase in computational effort, the class of hybrid models is becoming popular because of the gain in explanatory power (Mariel et al., 2015).
The policy context of our analysis is the study of tourists' WTP for a participatory management of a tourism destination, i.e. the Monte Baldo Local Nature Park in the Province of Trento, which is located in the Italian Prealps. The traditional management and planning of territories has always been carried out by the Province of Trento, which is not efficient because it is not fully aware of the needs and opportunities of local communities and of the specific characteristics of natural resources. On the other hand, a co-management of local natural resources made together with local inhabitants may increase the quality of touristic offers and improve the recreational experience of visitors. A project to allow community-based management has been launched in several districts of the Province, including Monte Baldo. The project will create the so called “reserve network” for protected areas, aiming at involving local communities in management and balance ecological, social and economic aspects. Testing the theory of planned behaviour in this context is useful to understand the drivers of individuals' attitude towards natural resources management and the acceptability of conservation measures, so that potential sources of conflicts can be timely identified. In addition, the proposed model provides new insights on the sources of preference heterogeneity given by individuals' norms and beliefs.
Section snippets
Participatory management
Natural resource management has been traditionally carried out using top-down approaches, in which a governmental agency of a public administration takes decisions without consultation (Prell et al., 2007). This often means that decision-makers are distant from policy sites and do not possess a deep knowledge of local needs (Barrio and Loureiro, 2010). Top-down approaches are deemed to have failed because they are insensitive to local inhabitants and stakeholders (Maier et al., 2014; Kellert et
Study area
Monte Baldo Local Nature Park is located in the eastern Italian Prealps in the Province of Trento, which is an important tourist destination with around three million tourists per year and a good balance between winter and summer tourists. Monte Baldo Local Nature Park includes seven protected areas: five Natura 2000 areas, one regional nature reserve and two local nature reserves. The Park is very rich in flora biodiversity and includes 28.7 floristic species per km2 compared to 2.3 of other
Results and discussions
Respondents answered to TPB indicators giving median and high scores frequently (Table 7 in supplementary materials shows answers to all indicators). We conducted a Chi-squared test on all pairs of indicators to test the association between answers. All tests rejected the hypothesis of independence between answers (p-value = 0.000 for all pairs), therefore suggesting that large scores for one indicator are associated with large score for the others and vice versa. This result confirms previous
Conclusions
In this paper we implemented a hybrid latent class mixed logit model to explain the effect of individuals' planned behaviour on preferences for a decentralized management of natural resources. A stated CE was carried out in a study in the Italian Prealps to collect the data, in which the null alternative was represented by the traditional standard management while costly alternatives were options for local managements. Although the baseline MXL and the HMXL returned similar estimates in terms
Acknowledgements
This research was funded by the European project LIFE11/NAT/IT/000187 “TEN”—Trentino Ecological Network (D2 action). The authors wishes to thank the coordinator of Monte Baldo park Manuela Francesconi and the interviewers.
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2022, Tourism Management PerspectivesCitation Excerpt :This can be justified by the complexity of consumers' pro-environmental behaviour and the complexity of contextual variables. Consequently, previous research has adopted TPB to understand the main drivers of travellers' pro-environmental behaviour (Clark et al., 2019), while other studies have extended the TPB to explain this phenomenon (e.g., Grilli & Notaro, 2019; Kaffashi and Shamsudin, 2019; Li & Wu, 2020). Furthermore, scholars have adopted multiple theories to develop an integrated model that explains pro-environmental behaviour.