Building social license to operate? Evidence from a randomized information intervention in aquaculture

2025-06-07

2027-12-31

1. Knowledge of Maine Aquaculture & Maine Economy
2. Rank Order Preference of Priorities for Coastal Communities
3. Rank Order Preference of Initiatives/Actions in Coastal Communities
4. Choice Experiment Allocation from Community Clean Energy Programs
5. Choice Experiment Allocation from Resilient Working Waterfront Program

1. Knowledge of Maine Aquaculture & Maine Economy: Five survey question responses will be used to construct a quiz score for each respondent
2. Rank Order Preference of Priorities for Coastal Communities: Respondents will order the following priorities from most important (1) to least important (5).
a. Economic Well-Being
b. Coastal Resilience
c. Water-based industries
d. Public services
e. Maine’s Cultural Identity
3. Rank Order Preference of Initiatives/Actions in Coastal Communities: Respondents will order the following initiatives from most important (1) to least important (5).
a. Facilitating and supporting shellfish and seaweed aquaculture operations
(each respondent will see 4 randomly selected alternatives from the list below)
b. Facilitating and supporting finfish aquaculture operations
c. Facilitating and supporting commercial fishing operations
d. Enhancing and maintaining working waterfront infrastructure
e. Improving storm readiness and resilience of coastal communities
f. Improving and maintaining the coastal habitat
g. Supporting recreational use of Maine’s coastal areas
h. Supporting development of renewable energy production
i. Supporting development of affordable housing
j. Investing in k-12 and adult education
k. Supporting new and established small businesses
l. Supporting engagement in community management and volunteer capacity
m. Supporting programs for healthy aging adults
n. Enhancing and maintaining shelters and food banks
4-5. Choice Experiment Allocations: Respondents make an incentive-compatible allocation of funds that are being gifted to a non-governmental organization. Respondents will see the following prompt (organization name withheld):
"(A non-governmental organization) has been gifted $1,000. The money will be allocated to programs based on input from survey respondents, including possibly yours. Think carefully about your response to each scenario because one, and only one, response will be randomly selected from all submitted surveys this season. The money will be allocated according to that selection. The maximum amount that you can choose to give for each scenario is $1,000."
Each respondent then faces two scenarios. In each scenario, they choose how much of the $1,000 to reallocate from that scenario's program to Sustainable Aquaculture programs.

We will conduct a randomized control trial to assign invitations to participate in tours of aquaculture farms to members of coastal communities in Maine. Our research design leverages planned tours in the coming three years (2025-2027) to identify the causal effect of the tours on participants’ knowledge and valuation of aquaculture. Tours occur in different locations along the coast of Maine. For each tour, we will use publicly available information from government websites to develop a list of policymakers based near the site of the tour. For each tour, the research team will use the list of individuals to randomly assign the order in which individuals are be invited to the aquaculture tour using the statistical program Stata. We will assign each individual a random number drawn from a uniform distribution ranging from 0 to 1. Then we will rank individuals in order of their random number from small to large. To recruit individuals for the tour, the Island Institute will invite the individuals with the smallest random numbers using their usual methods of outreach (email/phone). This process ensures that randomization is the mechanism through which all tour participants are invited.

Not available

Randomization done in office by a computer

Individual, stratified by tour

No

240

240

120 individuals control, 120 individuals treatment