​Cash for sharks: designing and testing conservation incentives in Indonesia’s small-scale fisheries

​Sharks and rays are amongst the most threatened vertebrate taxa, primarily due to overfishing. Small-scale fisheries are a major contributor to global shark and ray fishing mortality yet also underpin the livelihoods and food security of millions of people. Reducing overfishing in small-scale fisheries often means confronting a classic conservation–livelihoods trade-off: threatened species have real consumptive use value in coastal communities, and conservation carries real opportunity costs, borne by communities that often have low economic welfare and limited access to alternative work or markets.

​In this CCI In Conversation talk, award-winning conservation scientist and practitioner Dr Hollie Booth will discuss how positive incentives, such as conditional cash transfers or support to switch to lower-impact fishing activities, offer a promising conservation solution. They can quickly and cost-effectively change behaviour while supporting incomes, and, if well designed, can distribute the costs of conservation more fairly. But theory alone cannot tell us whether they will work. Incentives can pay people for things they would have done anyway or quietly reward behaviours that undermine the very goal they were meant to serve. There is remarkably little empirical evidence on how to design them well.

​Results from Hollie's work in Indonesia shows that incentives can rapidly shift conservation-relevant behaviour and, when well designed, deliver gains for both marine biodiversity and coastal communities. They also bring unexpected challenges that conventional, non-experimental evaluation would miss entirely, increasing the need for rigorous impact evaluation, adaptive management and a culture of continuous learning.

​More broadly, this body of work provides a replicable approach to designing, testing and adapting incentive programmes that can be applied to almost any behaviourally-mediated conservation problem, which Hollie hopes to expand over the next 5-years at Christ's College during her Senior Research Fellowship at the Darwin–Hamied Centre.

​About the speaker

​Dr Hollie Booth is an award-winning conservation scientist and practitioner who works at the interface of research, policy and community action to protect marine biodiversity and support coastal livelihoods. Her research combines ecology, behavioural and economic sciences, and causal inference, with a major focus on shark and ray conservation in small-scale fisheries in Indonesia. She led the first randomised controlled trial of a marine conservation incentive program, published in Science Advances in 2025. She is lead author of eighteen peer-reviewed papers in journals including Nature Ecology & Evolution and Trends in Ecology & Evolution, and co-author of over thirty more. Alongside her research she co-founded Yayasan Kebersamaan Untuk Lautan (KUL), an Indonesian NGO implementing incentive-based conservation programs in Aceh and West Nusa Tenggara provinces, which she helps to design and evaluate through her academic research. In October 2026, she will take up a 5-year Senior Research Fellowship (SRF) at the Darwin–Hamied Centre at Christ’s College, Cambridge, during which she hopes to expand on her work in Indonesia to develop a large-scale, multi-country randomised evaluation of marine conservation incentives across small-scale fisheries in the tropics.

​Before her SRF she held research fellowships at the Universities of Oxford and Bangor and currently holds adjunct positions at James Cook University (Australia) and IPB University, (Indonesia). She previously led the Nature Strategies team at The Biodiversity Consultancy, advising multinational corporations on their Nature Positive commitments, and spent over a decade working for conservation NGOs in Southeast Asia (the Wildlife Conservation Society), East Africa (Frankfurt Zoological Society) and Cambridge (UNEP-WCMC). Her awards include the Oxford University MPLS Division Social Impact Award, the ZSL Marsh Award for Marine and Freshwater Conservation, the Society for Conservation Biology's European Early Career Research Award, and top-ten finalist status for the 2025 Indianapolis Prize Emerging Conservationist Award. She holds a DPhil in Zoology from the University of Oxford, an MSc in Conservation Science from Imperial College London, and a BA in Natural Sciences and Management Studies from the University of Cambridge. Coming from a failed state school and being the first person in her family to receive a university degree, she is also passionate about supporting earlier career researchers from non-traditional backgrounds to thrive in academia. When she’s not doing research, she is usually surfing, training for a Hyrox race, or reading sci-fi books.

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