A global analysis of factors predicting conservationists' values

[摘要] 1. There exists a wealth of philosophical, sociological and anthropological literature on environmental values; yet, few studies have investigated the valuesheld by conservationists themselves, and how these shape the conservationmovement.2. Here, we present the first global analysis of the relationships between conservationists' values and a broad range of conservationists' characteristics,categorised into their educational and professional background, geographicalcontext and personal experiences in childhood and adulthood. We draw onsurvey responses from 9264 conservationists from 149 countries to conductthe broadest analysis to date of what factors are associated with the values ofconservationists.3. Our results demonstrate that 13 characteristics of conservationists' personal and professional backgrounds are statistically related to their valuesregarding the place of people, science, capitalism and nonhuman entities inconservation. Of these characteristics, educational specialism and continentof nationality had the highest predictive power. We also draw on open-textresponses to uncover other factors that conservationists identify as havingbeen important in shaping their values; travel and religion were the mostcommonly reported.4. Our findings have important implications for current debates on diversity andinclusion within the conservation community. In particular, we provide broadempirical evidence that increasing personal and professional diversity in conservation organisations is likely to also increase the range of values represented.We also discuss the implications of our results for interdisciplinarity, the management of disagreement and conflict in conservation, and the training of futuregenerations of conservationists.

[学科分类] 护理学

[关键词] conflict;diversity;education;ethics;perspectives;place