Increasing Safe Harbor Agreement enrollment: a choice experiment approach to investigate preferred contract attributes

Abstract

Safe Harbor Agreements (SHAs) are one of the voluntary incentive programs designed to neutralize some of the costs and burdens associated with endangered species protection on private lands under the Endangered Species Act. They have demonstrated mixed success in terms of landowner participation, indicating that merely offering an SHA is not enough to persuade landowners to enter into agreements with government entities to protect endangered species. Yet little research has investigated landowner decision-making and the programmatic structures that influence participation in SHAs. In this study, we employed hypothetical choice experiment offerings of Houston toad (Bufo houstonensis) SHAs to explore the reasoning behind Texas landowners' (n = 956) willingness to participate in the program, and to reveal programmatic characteristics most appealing to landowners. Respondents were most frequently willing to enroll in an SHA because of beliefs about and a sense of responsibility towards conserving nature, and were unwilling to potentially enroll in an SHA because they did not know enough about SHAs, did not want the government involved in their land management, and did not want to enter a binding agreement regarding endangered species. Additionally, respondents were more likely to enroll in hypothetical SHAs if the agreements included 10-year contract durations and full future assurances, and less likely to enroll if they included 30-year contract durations. This study provides program administrators with insights into how to improve the design and delivery of SHAs to increase participation among private landowners.