Motivations for (non-)compliance with conservation rules by small-scale resource users

Understanding compliance with conservation rules is key for biodiversity conservation. Here, we assess compliance and its underlying motivations in a small-scale fishery in Chile. We adapt a framework originally developed for forestry to unpack compliance motivations at within-individual and between-individuals levels while accounting for contextual factors. We find that 92-100% fishers comply with temporal or gear rules, while only 3% comply with the quota limit. Legitimacy-based motivations are more important in explaining why individual fishers comply with temporal/gear rules than they are for compliance with the quota. At the between-individuals level, we find that normative motivations are significantly related to the degree of non-compliance with the quota. Contextual factors such as quota levels are key in explaining broader non-compliance patterns. Our results suggest that considering compliance at appropriate analytical levels is necessary to unpack motivations, guide local and national natural resource management policies, and move toward a better theory of compliance.