Conservation challenges are often behavioral challenges. To solve them, it is important to consider how human behaviors at all levels of a system can support, scale, or block progress to your conservation goals. Behavior change is the process of changing what people do –  increasing, maintaining, or decreasing a current behavior, or adopting a new behavior. When seeking to change behavior, it is key to understand the unique social, cultural, political, and economic contexts and systems in which these behaviors occur. This includes understanding whether your goals align with the goals of key actors and interested parties, reflecting on your biases and power dynamics about “right” behaviors, and considering the potential to do harm instead of good. Behavior change activities should be transparent and inclusive and follow ethical guidelines for research, engagement, communication, and evaluation.

Regardless of the scope you define, addressing conservation challenges almost always necessitates understanding, changing, and/or amplifying human behavior at one or more levels.

This website aims to be an additional resource to support applying behavior change theory when going through the Conservation Standards cycle.  The behavior change frameworks page provides a deep dive into the theory and thinking behind different frameworks evaluated to build a set of levers to help use behavior-centered design in conservation planning. Each lever subpage captures the definition of the lever, guidance on selecting strategies and building theories of change using the lever, lever applications, and other tips, such as lever combinations and common traps to avoid. 

When designing your behavior change strategy, we recommend you review your research on target actors and behaviors to select the most appropriate and effective levers for your given context. Each lever contains many different and related sub-types, so selecting the right ones is both an art and a science, involving testing and feedback. Reviewing the steps of the Conservation Standards 5.0 and the guidance provided on this website will help you decide when to apply the levers to your work. 

Although CS practitioners have always considered behavior change, they often did so implicitly. For example, the “old school” theory of change pathway on the top of the following figures shows a strategy that involves reducing demand for shark-fin soup consumption by generally targeting restaurants. However, it does not identify the specific actors being targeted and the behaviors we want them to adopt. By contrast, the "behavior-informed" version on the bottom shows not only the specific actors being targeted and the behaviors we want them to adopt, but also the particular behavior change levers being used and even the intermediate desired psycho-social states of the actors. 

If this seems helpful, then the rest of this website will guide you towards creating your own behavior-informed theories of change!