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While restauranteurs are important actors in seafood systems, information on their decisions and views on sustainability is lacking. Using mixed methods, we explored Chilean restauranters' contexts, decisions, and views on seafood sustainability. Menus in Chile are diverse and dominated by domestic and wild-caught sources. Restauranters are willing to participate in traceability programs, especially when it is for both sustainability and health safety reasons. Restauranters believe that seafood is an elite resource and high prices are inhibiting access. They also believe patrons care little about seafood sustainability yet are willing to pay a premium for it. This contradiction suggests a mechanism for activating values via situational factors. While demand and benefits for seafood traceability programs appear present, challenges threaten successful implementation. Complex socio-economic factors, such as affordability, elitism, and inequity, need to be integrated into traceability program design to contribute to the necessary transformation of seafood systems.

The success of conservation efforts for imperiled and endangered wildlife species relies on private landowners, yet a definitive model of landowner cooperation remains elusive. We use a case study to explore the multiple pathways by which demographics, rootedness, resource dependence, environmental attitudes, social influence, and program structure intersect to jointly explain participation in a federally funded cost-share program to help prevent the Lesser Prairie-Chicken from being listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. We conducted structured interviews across three ecoregions with 64 participants and 22 nonparticipants. We analyzed the data using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, an approach that identifies the multiple combinations of conditions related to engagement in the program. We found that two concepts, landowner characteristics and social influence, were most commonly associated with participation while profiles representing typical landowner tropes performed poorly. Finally, the positive effect of encouragement by agency representatives suggests that agency staff play a central role in determining participation. It also suggests landowners' decision processes may not be as deliberative as the literature on private lands conservation suggests. The results of our case study suggest new avenues for research that explicitly consider the role of heuristics in decisions to participate.

The success of conservation efforts for imperiled and endangered wildlife species relies on private landowners, yet a definitive model of landowner cooperation remains elusive. We use a case study to explore the multiple pathways by which demographics, rootedness, resource dependence, environmental attitudes, social influence, and program structure intersect to jointly explain participation in a federally funded cost-share program to help prevent the Lesser Prairie-Chicken from being listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. We conducted structured interviews across three ecoregions with 64 participants and 22 nonparticipants. We analyzed the data using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, an approach that identifies the multiple combinations of conditions related to engagement in the program. We found that two concepts, landowner characteristics and social influence, were most commonly associated with participation while profiles representing typical landowner tropes performed poorly. Finally, the positive effect of encouragement by agency representatives suggests that agency staff play a central role in determining participation. It also suggests landowners' decision processes may not be as deliberative as the literature on private lands conservation suggests. The results of our case study suggest new avenues for research that explicitly consider the role of heuristics in decisions to participate.

Payments for ecosystem services programs have become common tools but most have failed to achieve wide-ranging conservation outcomes. The capacity for scale and impact increases when PES programs are designed through the lens of the potential participants, yet this has received little attention in research or practice. Our work with small-scale marine fisheries integrates the social science of PES programs and provides a framework for designing programs that focus a priori on scaling. In addition to payments, desirable nonmonetary program attributes and ecological feedbacks attract a wider range of potential participants into PES programs, including those who have more negative attitudes and lower trust. Designing programs that draw individuals into participating in PES programs is likely the most strategic path to reaching scale. Research should engage in new models of participatory research to understand these dynamics and to design programs that explicitly integrate a broad range of needs, values, and modes of implementation.