Abstract
With growing global public awareness of a wide range of conservation and environmental issues, environmental volunteerism is increasing. In order to attract and retain volunteers, it is useful to understand what benefits they hope for as well as the barriers that hinder their participation. Here we examine the benefits from and barriers to participation in 26 conservation and environmental civic organisations in South Africa, categorised by their primary mission as botanical, wildlife or green. Questionnaires were sent to volunteers on the mailing list of each civic organisation (and 66 responses received), supplemented with direct interviews with key staff and five focus group discussions. There were differences in the perception of benefits obtained and barriers experienced by volunteers between the three groups. Respondents from botanical and green civic organisations rated enjoyment of the task as the primary benefit, whereas the most common response amongst wildlife organisation volunteers was a higher level of life satisfaction. Lack of time was a major barrier across all groups, whilst lack of communication between organisers and volunteers was mentioned frequently by volunteers in wildlife and green organisations. The mean number of hours offered per volunteer was significantly higher amongst wildlife organisations than either botanical or green ones, but for all three, the value of volunteer contributions was, at several millions of rand annually, substantial. There was no relationship between the number of perceived benefits and the number of hours volunteered. This study indicates that motivations and barriers differ amongst volunteers, which is important to acknowledge in attracting and optimising the contributions of conservation and environmental volunteers.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank all the volunteers and organisers who participated. The field costs were provided by the South African Research Chairs Initiative of the Department of Science and Technology and the National Research Foundation of South Africa. Any opinion, finding, conclusion or recommendation expressed in this material is that of the authors and the NRF does not accept any liability in this regard. We are grateful for comments from Georgina Cundill on an earlier draft of this work.
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Communicated by Dirk Sven Schmeller.
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Higgins, O., Shackleton, C.M. The benefits from and barriers to participation in civic environmental organisations in South Africa. Biodivers Conserv 24, 2031–2046 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-015-0924-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-015-0924-6