Reducing Desire for Ivory - A Psychosocial Guide to Address Ivory Consumption

“Raising awareness about the damage and risk to wildlife is usually not sufficient to change behavior. We need to also address the complex psychosocial factors that often influence ivory desire.”

Despite a range of mass media and public awareness campaigns to dissuade the public from buying ivory products, the desire for ivory persists. “Legal markets thrive in some places, with government sanction, and vigorous black markets operate out of view. The illegal ivory trade is alive and well — and driving the rampant poaching of wild elephants.”  To address the continued consumption of ivory, this guide shares a set of psychosocial insights and tools for reducing consumer demand - or, as reframed in this guide, desire - for ivory.  It presents a new lens through which to view conservation campaigns and their audiences - one that takes on the complex psychological, neuroscientific, emotional, social, and cultural dimensions of ivory consumption. It is intended to support efforts that directly address the active market for these goods, including groups that are hardest to reach. 

As explained in the guide, “[T]he term “psychosocial” refers to the interplay between our individual psychology and the social and cultural context in which we live. Psychosocial research probes the below-the-surface motivations that drive our actions and choices. It is an approach which recognizes that appeals to people’s rationality or facts about our crises are not sufficient unless campaigners and communicators engage with how individuals and societies manage their complex relationships with the natural world.”

The guide is intended to be a first step in teaching conservationists how to apply a psychosocial lens to conservation work.  However, the approach it outlines is not meant to replace current campaign strategies, but to build upon their strengths and amplify their effectiveness.

The guide is structured as follows:

Part 1 - Basic concepts - explains concepts such as "psychosocial" and "desire"
Part 2 - Current  approaches: the landscape - this section looks at the Quadrants of Engagement which helps people categorise and analyse the wide range of campaign approaches into four distinct groups, characterised by their dominant feature: Regulatory/Enforcement, Awareness-Raising/Culture, Behavioral Economic/Social Marketing, and Desire (the approach being promoted in this guide).
Part 3 - Toward a psychosocial approach - Three interlocking components form the bedrock of desire for a product like ivory: Desires, Relationships, and Conflict. To develop and apply a psychosocial approach, this section familiarises the reader with these concepts.
Part 4 - Redirecting desire - One of the most critical elements of the psychosocial approach is the redirect. This is the process of shifting people’s attachments and desires away from ivory onto a set of new, elephant-safe ways to fulfill them. Redirecting doesn’t necessarily mean replacing desire for ivory with desire for a new product, but rather replacing the feeling someone gets from buying ivory or the need it fills with another.
Worksheets - These include: Exploring the Desire of Ivory Consumption; Exploring Conflict and Dilemmas; The Quadrant; Free Association Mapping; A “Redirect” Approach (Psychosocial)
Resources - a list of resource for further reading.