The Roles of Risk Perceptions and Social Trust in Willingness to Pay for Wildlife Reintroduction

Abstract

Economic valuation can aid decision-makers in justifying the costs of conservation programs like wildlife reintroductions. Factors like stakeholder trust and confidence in conservation professionals for their ability to manage risks may play important roles in determining how local residents support and value the conservation of reintroduced species. This study analyzed data collected from a household survey of residents near an elk restoration zone in East Tennessee and found their willingness to pay (WTP) for reintroduced elk conservation to be $45.53 per household. Moreover, WTP was positively related with trust and confidence in agency professionals, and negatively related with perceived risks associated with elk. WTP also varied according to resident dependence on land for income and demographic characteristics. Results shed light on the economic benefit of wildlife reintroduction programs and the importance of social-psychological factors such as risk perception, trust and confidence in enhancing support for conservation programs.

Keywords:

• Contingent valuation
• elk
• existence value
• institutional trust
• Tennessee
• wildlife conservation

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency for funding support in collection of data used in this study. We are also grateful to Brad Miller, John Mike, Binod Chapagain for their input at various stages of this study.

Notes

1 To test the effect of the location of resident within or outside the ERZ, the models were run with this variable and this was found to have an insignificant impact on willingness to pay for elk conservation.

2 The sample sizes decreased as variables were added to the nested models. When the sample sizes in the first two models were constrained to 781 observations, as in the third model, the mean WTP in the Bid Only model was $60.03 and $55.05 in the Bid and Sociodemographic model. The final benefit estimation (Table 5) was calculated using the mean WTP from the third model shown in Table 4.