Financial incentives may aid in conservation if they broaden the numbers and types of landowners who engage in protection and conservation management on private land. We examined the hypotheses that financial incentives (1) encourage participation of people with lower autonomous motivation towards conservation and lower self-transcendence (i.e. benevolence and universalism) values compared to participants in similar programmes without such incentives; (2) enable more on-ground works and activities; and (3) enhance feelings of competence and autonomy with respect to conservation actions. We surveyed 193 landowners in private land conservation programmes in Tasmania, only some of whom had received financial incentives. All of these landowners had high self-transcendence values, and autonomous motivation towards the environment. Owners of large properties and participants with higher self-enhancement values, lower self-transcendence values and lower autonomous motivation towards the environment were slightly more likely to engage in incentive programmes. However, people who received funding did not report more conservation actions than people in programmes without incentives. Owners of larger properties receiving incentives reported fewer conservation actions. Thus financial incentives probably recruited a few into nature conservation who may not have otherwise engaged, but did not result in a more intensive level of conservation management. Our results caution against the blanket-use of incentives amongst landowners who may already have values and motivations consistent with environmental action, and point to the need for further research on the socio-psychological characteristics of landowners, to examine the contextual factors that influence the effects of conservation payments.

An etic approach was used to describe the values of Filipino adolescents and to show how pan-cultural comparisons using a values survey can complement emic approaches to studying values. Participants were 752 adolescents who answered the Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ). The results indicate that PVQ has structural validity and adequate internal consistency. Ranks of the value types were compared with pan-cultural student norms; the results indicate that (a) Filipino adolescents’ value type hierarchies are substantially similar (same top, same middle, same bottom ranked values), and (b) Filipino adolescents gave higher rankings for hedonism and stimulation and lower ranking for achievement.