Conservation has no shortage of ambitious policy. Marine protected areas now cover roughly 8% of the world’s oceans. Protected lands account for nearly a fifth of the planet’s terrestrial surface. Community forest concessions span millions of hectares across the tropics. On paper, the progress is striking.

Yet conservationists have long warned about “paper parks”: protected areas that exist in law but not in practice. After the legislation passes, boundaries are gazetted and rules changed, but the wildlife, fish and forests do not recover because the human behavior those rules depend on never shift. Paper parks illustrate something conservationists have learned the hard way: structural reform is necessary, but rarely sufficient. Structural reform sets the rules, but behavioral dynamics determine whether those rules become a functioning system — or a paper park.

This problem sits at the center of a debate sparked by Nick Chater and George Loewenstein’s recent book, It’s On You: How Corporations and Behavioral Scientists Have Convinced Us That We’re to Blame for Society’s Deepest Problems. Both authors are leading behavioral scientists, part of a field that studies how people actually make decisions and respond to incentives, drawing on insights from economics, psychology and related disciplines.

Their critique targets what they call the “i-frame”: interventions that try to change individual behavior within existing systems, like reminder messages, information campaigns and default settings. Corporations and policymakers, they argue, often prefer this approach because it shifts attention away from structural reforms that might threaten powerful interests. The alternative is the “s-frame,” which focuses on changing the system itself through laws, regulations and institutional design.

Their critique lands where it should, as many nudges are simply too small for the problems they target. Carbon footprint calculators promoted by oil company BP are a classic example — this was a tool that encouraged consumers to worry about their personal emissions while diverting attention from fossil fuel production — but for problems that require wholesale transformation of energy systems, food systems and financial systems, small behavioral tweaks are not enough.

Chater and Loewenstein’s central point, that structural reforms often matter more than marginal behavioral interventions, is an important corrective. But there is a risk in how their argument may be interpreted. Read too broadly, it can sound as if once structural reform is achieved, the behavioral work becomes secondary — useful for smoothing implementation or improving what the authors call “ergonomics,” but not where the real challenge lies.

Conservation experience suggests something different: even well-designed policy rarely works on its own.

A fisher may know where the no-take zone is, a farmer may understand the forest boundary, and a community living beside a wildlife corridor may be fully aware of the regulations against poaching. All the same, they may still break the rules, and for good reason — because the short-term incentives still favor extraction, or enforcement is weak, or because individuals do not trust that others will comply.

At its core, conservation often hinges on a coordination problem. Sustainable fisheries, forests and wildlife populations depend on communities collectively restraining their use of shared resources. A fisher will only forgo adding to today’s catch if they believe others will do the same. Without that shared expectation, the rational choice is often to catch fish before someone else does. That coordination does not automatically follow from legislation. It has to be built.

This is where behavioral science matters, but not only in the narrow sense of nudges aimed at individual consumers. Anticipating behavioral responses in policy design is only part of the challenge: conservation often requires building the social infrastructure — norms of cooperation, systems of monitoring, and expectations of compliance — that makes rules workable in the first place.

This is also where the neat distinction between the “i-frame” and the “s-frame” begins to blur, as the line between changing individuals and changing systems becomes difficult to draw. If cooperation, monitoring and shared norms are what make a policy work in practice, then those behavioral dynamics are not simply an individual response to the system: they are part of the system itself. The rules written into law matter, but the expectations people form about whether others will comply — and the institutions communities build to enforce those expectations — are what ultimately determine whether the policy changes real-world outcomes.

Debates over protected area boundaries, rules, and “fortress conservation” have raged for years, as this Mongabay series illustrated:

Here again, conservation policy offers a vivid illustration. A recent column in The Washington Post about wolf recovery in the U.S. West described how early enforcement of the Endangered Species Act (ESA), a crown jewel of U.S. environmental legislation, placed strict limits on land once endangered habitat was identified. Economists later observed that some forest owners responded by harvesting trees earlier than they otherwise would have, before they could mature enough to attract protected species. One study even found that listing under the ESA was, on average, detrimental to species recovery when it was not paired with substantial government funding. Regulators eventually adapted by introducing “safe harbor” agreements that assured landowners they would not face additional regulatory burdens if they voluntarily restored habitat. Up to this point, the example illustrates Chater and Loewenstein’s argument well: good policy design depends on understanding incentives.

But even after incentives are correct, the story does not end there. For safe harbor agreements to work in practice, landowners must trust that regulators will honor the agreement. They must believe that compliance is normal rather than naïve. Achieving that is one thing in a country like the United States with relatively strong institutional stability and predictable enforcement. It is something entirely different in many of the places where conservation priorities are highest — contexts where governments may be less trusted, enforcement capacity is weaker, and communities must often rely on their own systems of monitoring and cooperation to make rules meaningful.

Consider the dynamics in many tropical coastal fisheries around the world: though governments may establish marine reserves or territorial fishing rights that define who can fish where, recovery often depends on whether fishing communities develop shared expectations about compliance, credible systems for monitoring violations, plus confidence that others will follow the rules.

In practice, this often means visible boundary markers, community monitoring systems, and collective commitments that make rule-breaking both observable and socially costly. The difference between a thriving fishery and a paper park is often not the policy itself but the social infrastructure and local leadership that supports it.

The same pattern appears in agriculture. Governments may promote sustainable farming practices through extension services, training programs or subsidies. Yet adoption often spreads only when farmers see trusted peers succeed first, when community expectations shift, and when new practices become socially credible.

Chater and Loewenstein are right that nudges aimed at consumer choice will not solve the challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss or deforestation. They are also right that corporations have often promoted individual responsibility framing to block regulation. But the lesson for conservation — and for many other policy domains — is not that behavioral insight matters less once structural reform is achieved.

Decades of paper parks have taught conservationists that gazetting a protected area is the beginning of conservation, not the end, even when the policy itself is well designed. The work that follows — building norms of cooperation, systems of monitoring, and expectations of compliance — is not an ergonomic detail. It is the mechanism through which conservation actually happens.

Structural reform without behavioral design produces paper parks: policies that exist in law but not in practice. Behavioral design without structural reform produces engagement without the institutional scaffolding needed for lasting change.

Durable conservation happens when people trust the rules, expect others to follow them, and participate in the systems that make compliance real. Where those behavioral foundations are missing, even the best policies remain paper promises.

Structural reform may change the rules, but conservation succeeds only when the behaviors those rules depend on take hold.

Kevin Green is senior vice president of global solutions at Rare, where he works on applying behavioral and social science to global conservation challenges.

Banner image: Fishers in the Philippines. Image courtesy of Rare.

Related audio from Mongabay’s podcast: Mongabay features writer Ashoka Mukpo visited communities adjacent to protected areas in three African nations to assess the state of their conservation practices and get a better picture of the role of rangers in enforcing their protection, listen here:

See a related commentary:

Protected areas in Africa are vital but local perceptions vary (commentary)

Citations:

Relano, V., & Pauly, D. (2023). The ‘Paper Park Index’: Evaluating Marine Protected Area effectiveness through a global study of stakeholder perceptions. Marine Policy, 151, 105571. doi:10.1016/j.marpol.2023.105571

Ferraro, P. J., McIntosh, C., & Ospina, M. (2007). The effectiveness of the US endangered species act: An econometric analysis using matching methods. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 54(3), 245-261. doi:10.1016/j.jeem.2007.01.002

Gutiérrez, N. L., Hilborn, R., & Defeo, O. (2011). Leadership, social capital and incentives promote successful fisheries. Nature, 470(7334), 386-389. doi:10.1038/nature09689

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