Using social marketing to bridge the gap between systematic conservation planning and implementation at the local government level

The study presented here describes an attempt to bridge the gap between systematic conservation assessment and decision-making for land-use planning in the Eastern Cape province, South Africa. The aim was to investigate how to effectively convince officials concerned with land use planning processes in the local municipal sphere to include conservation priorities meaningfully in their processes. The approach used to reach this aim was social marketing, the use of marketing technologies and concepts to effect behavior changes to further societal good. So far social marketing is not commonly used in the conservation domain; I therefore aimed also at proving the usefulness of this approach for conservation. Following the introduction which provides background to the project and a more detailed summary, Chapter 2 provides a detailed and comprehensive review of the considerations and concepts regarding the use of social marketing in a context geared at protecting nature. The research on the primary target group for this study, officials concerned with land use planning processes in the local municipal sphere is described in Chapter 3. The main outcomes were that land use planners perceive few needs with regards to implementing the incorporation of biodiversity conservation issues in the land use planning process, and that the deficiencies in the land use planning process per se, as well as the lack of recognition in the political sphere (the domain of elected councilors), represent the core barriers to adopting the conservation priorities. I conclude that to effect behavior change towards adoption of conservation priorities the land use planning processes need to be supported and the political sphere need to be included in the behavior change process. 6 Chapter 4 therefore focuses on the new target group that emerged as essential in the previous chapter, locally elected councilors. I found that councilors do actually consider land use planning procedures as being important, but also as being dysfunctional. Councilors do value their natural environment for themselves as well as for its tourism value, but most councilors had little understanding of what the term “biodiversity” means and did not connect the term “sustainability” with the natural environment. It became also evident, that councilors do not see conservation in a predominantly positive manner. Chapter 5 therefore yields insight on councilor’s perception that environmental protection and development are mutually exclusive, and the negative frames attached to the conservation endeavor as being socially unjust, disrespectful and utopian. In Chapter 6 I investigated the usefulness of a tractable and well established measure of environmental attitudes or beliefs. I assessed my target audience’s responses to the New Ecological Paradigm scale and the Inclusion of Nature in Self scale. I conclude in Chapter 7 with an account of the difficulties I encountered during the project, an assessment of my project from a social marketing perspective, components of my project that did not yield the results expected, and a proposal for future research