Rural and urban attitudes to conflict and cooperation with wildfowl conservation directives in a community in China

Regulations prohibiting retaliatory killing of wildlife are widespread, but their efficacy depends on individuals' perceptions of, adherence to, and willingness to cooperate with these rules. We investigated the willingness of rural communities in China to cooperate with measures to reduce human-wildfowl conflict by examining the potential influence of individual attitudes and social factors on this willingness. Through a public survey and choice experiments with 1381 participants (344 rural residents in the Sanjiang Plain conflict areas and 1037 urban residents in Harbin and Beijing), we identified 5 distinct attitudes toward retaliatory killing of wildfowl in rural areas. Among these, the deterrence-driven (compliance motivated by fear of legal punishment), law-as-principle (adherence to law as a formal obligation), and law-morality-consensus (alignment between legal rules and personal moral values) attitudes predominated. Only respondents with a law-morality-consensus attitude had a significantly higher willingness to cooperate with wildfowl conservation efforts. Regarding wildfowl management policies, rural residents preferred population reduction, whereas urban residents favored population increases. Compounded by, for example, imbalanced economic development and the unilateral burden of wildlife-related losses, this urban-rural divergence may foster a sense of conservation-related inequity in rural residents. Such perceived inequity, exacerbated by limited participation in decision-making, could diminish rural residents' voluntary cooperation and create a cycle in which high economic losses by rural residents lead to differences between urban and rural conservation values that lead to shifts in local attitudes and result in retaliatory killing by rural residents. Management should prioritize ensuring that conservation benefits accrue to local communities. Such a shift could involve implementing scientifically assessed, quota-based hunting in high-conflict areas and channeling resulting revenues into community conservation efforts.