Business decisions have a huge impact on natural resource use and environmental quality, so the ability to influence these decisions presents an opportunity for significant conservation gains. How can conservationists tap into the range of factors that drive business behavior and motivate businesses to invest in conservation efforts?
Not surprisingly, most theories of business behavior emphasize financial motivations. A powerful, but incomplete theory is that businesses do not care about the environmental costs they impose on others because “externalized” costs do not affect profitability. The corollary is that environmentally beneficial behavior can be motivated by the imposition of those costs on firms. The need to internalize otherwise external social costs justifies most modern environmental laws and regulations.
Conservationists can focus their advocacy around new, reformed, or expanded government policies to internalize a broader suite of environmental costs on businesses, regulate or prohibit activities at odds with conservation goals, or subsidize desirable conservation behaviors. This strategy resulted in landmark policy and legal innovations in the 1960s and 1970s, and it continues today. But lobbying government to enact such policies is not the only strategy available to conservation advocates.
