Addressing behavior in pollinator conservation policies to combat the implementation gap

Solutions for conserving biodiversity lie in changing people's behavior. Ambitious international and national conservation policies frequently fail to effectively mitigate biodiversity loss because they rarely apply behavior-change theories. We conducted a gap analysis of conservation behavior-change interventions advocated in national conservation strategies with the Behavior Change Wheel (BCW), a comprehensive framework for systematically characterizing and designing behavior-change interventions. Using pollinator conservation as a case study, we classified the conservation actions listed in national pollinator initiatives in relation to intervention functions and policy categories of the BCW. We included all national-level policy documents from the European Union available in March 2019 that focused on conservation of pollinators (n = 8). A total of 610 pollinator conservation actions were coded using in-depth directed content analysis, resulting in the identification of 787 intervention function and 766 policy category codes. Overall, these initiatives did not employ the entire breadth of behavioral interventions. Intervention functions most frequently identified were education (23%) and environmental restructuring (19%). Least frequently identified intervention functions were incentivization (3%), and restriction (2%) and coercion were completely absent (0%). Importantly, 41% of all pollinator conservation actions failed to identify whose behavior was to be changed. Building on these analyses, we suggest that reasons for the serious implementation gap in national and international conservation policies is founded in insufficient understanding of which behavioral interventions to employ for most beneficial impacts on biodiversity and how to clearly specify the intervention targets. We recommend that policy advisors engage with behavior-change theory to design effective behavior-change interventions that underpin successful conservation policies.