Payoffs Versus Process: Expanding the Paradigm for Park/People Studies Beyond Economic Rationality
Stern MJ. 2010. Payoffs Versus Process: Expanding the Paradigm for Park/People Studies Beyond Economic Rationality. Journal of Sustainable Forestry. 29:174-201
ABSTRACT: The sustainability of protected areas relies heavily upon their abilities to broker positive relationships with local populations. A good deal of mainstream conservation efforts today are still based primarily within a dominating paradigm of economic rationality, best exemplified within Garrett Hardin’s classic 1968 treatise on the tragedy of the commons. Strategies based upon this paradigm, which tend to characterize local residents as rational actors aiming solely to maximize anticipated benefits versus potential costs, have met considerable resistance from local actors. They have thus often failed to achieve conservation goals. This is not because people do not think rationally or economically. Rather, it is because individuals’ analyses of the costs and benefits associated with protected areas are only one part of the process through which they formulate their reactions to them. Interviews and participant observation with local residents living in and around three national parks—Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee and North Carolina, United States; Virgin Islands National Park in the U.S. Virgin Islands; and Podocarpus National Park in Loja and Zamora-Chinchipe, Ecuador—reveal that individuals’ evaluations of other social factors, including trust, empowerment, and peer group attitudes, can overpower economic or other rational concerns in decision-making processes. This article discusses these findings and some of their implications for protected areas management.
- Type
- Journal Article
- Authors
- Stern, Marc
- Units
- GRSM , VIIS
- Keywords
- APHN, Appalachian Highlands Network, attitudes, cost-benefit analysis, economic rationality, economics, empowerment, gateway communities, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, GRSM, GRSM-00208, outreach, park neighbors, Podocarpus National Park, protected areas management, SER, social science, Southeast Region, theory of planned behavior, trust, VIIS, Virgin Islands National Park