Environmental Volunteering: Motivations, Modes and Outcomes

Thomas Measham and Guy B Barnett ()
Additional contact information
Guy B Barnett: CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, Australia

No 2007-03, Socio-Economics and the Environment in Discussion (SEED) Working Paper Series from CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems

Abstract: Volunteers play a key role in natural resource management: their commitment, time and labour constitute a major contribution towards managing environments in Australia and throughout the world. From the point of view of environmental managers much interest has focussed on defining tasks suitable to volunteers. However, we argue that an improved understanding of what motivates volunteers is required to sustain volunteer commitments to environmental management in the long term. This is particularly important given that multiple government programs rely heavily on volunteers in Australia, a phenomenon also noted in the UK, Canada, and the USA. Whilst there is considerable research on volunteering in other sectors (e.g. health), there has been relatively little attention paid to understanding environmental volunteering. Drawing on the literature from other sectors and environmental volunteering where available, we present a set of six broad motivations underpinning environmental volunteers and five different modes that environmental volunteering is manifested. We developed and refined the sets of motivations and modes through a pilot study involving interviews with volunteers and their coordinators from environmental groups in Sydney and the Bass Coast. The pilot study data emphasise the importance of promoting community education as a major focus of environmental volunteer groups and demonstrate concerns over the fine line between supporting and abusing volunteers given their role in delivering environmental outcomes.

Keywords: environment; volunteering; motivation; Natural Resource Management (NRM) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J29 Q57 Z10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2007-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.csiro.au/files/files/pi52.pdf First version, 2007 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.csiro.au/files/files/pi52.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.csiro.au/files/files/pi52.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cse:wpaper:2007-03

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Socio-Economics and the Environment in Discussion (SEED) Working Paper Series from CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CSE-Webrequest ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).