Understanding public administrators’ and citizens’ preferences for a successful transition to pesticide-free urban green spaces

Abstract

Bans on the cosmetic use of pesticides in urban green spaces (UGS) is part of the toolbox to reduce pesticide use. While most technical barriers have been lifted, the acceptability of the global changes induced by pesticide-free UGS management is questioned. Public administrators in charge of UGSs have their own preferences and poorly informed opinions on citizens’ ones. A Discrete Choice Experiment approach was adopted to investigate the discrepancy between the preferences of French citizens and public administrators in charge of technical and budget decisions, in 2017, when the pesticide ban was enforced. Results indicate that the most important differences are in the willingness to improve the working conditions of the maintenance teams, the interest in more natural UGSs and the relevance of communication on the pesticide ban. By challenging some of the opinions of UGS administrators with regard to citizens’ preferences, our results remove some of the barriers to a successful transition toward pesticide-free UGSs.

Keywords:

• choice experiment
• France
• pesticide
• stakeholders
• urban land

Acknowledgements

This action is led by the Ministry for Agriculture and Food and the Ministry for an Ecological and Solidarity Transition, with the financial support of the French Biodiversity Agency on “Call for research and innovation projects on the development of alternative solutions to plant protection products in gardens, green spaces and infrastructures” research call, with the fees for diffuse pollution coming from the Ecophyto plan. We thank Rafiou Alfa Boukari for his contribution to data collection, Raphaële Préget and Sophie Thoyer for helpful comments on the experimental design and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Credit author statement

Marianne Lefebvre: Conceptualisation, Funding acquisition, Project administration, Data Curation, Investigation, Writing – Original Draft; Maria Espinosa Goded: Methodology, Software, Writing – Original Draft; Masha Maslianskaia-Pautrel: Investigation, Writing – Review & Editing; Pauline Laille: Conceptualisation, Funding acquisition, Investigation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1 Citizens do not typically have the opportunity to choose the exact characteristics of the UGSs they visit and can rarely express their preferences on management options and how their city budget is allocated to UGS maintenance. However, in the same city, different areas can be managed differently following the principles of “differentiated management” (Allain 1997).

2 There is no opt-out in our design, since the transition to pesticide-free management is compulsory by law. The aim of the experiment is not to estimate the willingness to pay for (or accept) the pesticide ban (see Hirsch and Baxter (2009, 2011) for such a study in Canada). The status-quo is not an available option, since maintaining the UGS characteristics as they were before the pesticide ban but without access to pesticides would necessarily entail higher costs. The monetary attribute would therefore be modified.

3 For the question “Did you systematically ignore any characteristic(s) when choosing between options A and B?” we delete those who selected the answer “I didn’t ignore any characteristics” but at the same time selected one of the attributes.

4 The interpretations based on standard errors (such as p-values and confidence intervals) should be taken cautiously, since our sample is non-probabilistic. No inference for the population can be made (Hirschauer et al. 2020).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Agence française de la biodiversité.