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• We model voluntary investments by members of civil society into the environment. • We analyze 1,809 freshwater resource management arrangements in Germany and France. • Follow SES framework aim 'dissect and harness complexity'; boosted regression trees. • Social-ecological and governance context, norms and bottom-up social pressures key. • Context, incentives eclipse knowledge, cognitions for some pro-environmental actions. Encouraging pro-environmental behavior is an urgent global challenge. An interdisciplinary framework covering governance, economic, social, ecological, and psychological dimensions is required to understand the salient features that encourage pro-environmental outcomes within and across contexts. We apply the Ostrom social-ecological systems framework to model voluntary investments by members of civil society into the aquatic environment. Using a data set of 1,809 angling clubs managing water bodies for fish stocking and habitat management in Germany and France, we show that a small set of factors, most crucially social-ecological and governance context as well as social norms and other bottom-up social pressures, drive environmental investments. These factors appear to override behavioral influences from psychological variables of the decision-maker. By contrast, the contextual setting related to property rights, size of the resource system, and social expectations were found to be strongly related to behavioral decisions, highlighting that the social-ecological context as well as incentives may be more important than knowledge and cognitions in driving certain pro-environmental actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]