Not in it for the money: Meaningful relationships sustain voluntary land conservation initiatives in Peru

Abstract Voluntary land conservation, including privately protected areas (PPAs), is a key component of enabling the future of biodiversity on Earth. Accordingly, the question of motivations has preoccupied conservation social science. True motivations are difficult to ascertain, however, even for ourselves. Accordingly, we explore a novel narrative elicitation approach to ask: what features of the land and landowners' relationships with the land encourage and sustain their commitment to voluntary conservation? What value framings are conveyed by landowners when sharing their origin stories and the reasons for sustaining such efforts? We conducted semi‐structured interviews with 32 landowners of PPAs across Peru. Interviews were designed to elicit landowners' origin stories and ongoing relationships with the land, as well as the values they hold about those relationships. This paper challenges the current perception that PPAs are driven by wealthy and foreign landowners in the Peruvian context. Instead, this paper showcases PPAs as the manifestation of local visions for conservation that align with the landowners' longstanding relationships with the land. Here we identified 15 different relational values that landowners have with nature, non‐human and human beings that underlie their voluntary conservation efforts. The paper highlights the importance of taking a relational perspective (recognizing that our existence is enabled and shaped by the relationships we have with others and with nature) when studying land conservation, emphasizing how PPAs are the reflection of landowners' intention to maintain, protect and restore the multiple relationships embedded in the land they strive to conserve. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.