Abstract
To protect and restore ecosystems at the speed and scale required to meet current environmental challenges, a greater understanding of how conservation initiatives spread from existing to new adopters is required. According to the diffusion of innovation theory, positive adopter‐to‐peer communication is a powerful driver of innovation spread, whereas negative communications hinder innovation spread. Aware of this, businesses regularly survey customers and respond accordingly to maximize company growth. Therefore, we used 2 consumer satisfaction research measures commonly used by businesses, importance–performance analysis (IPA), which measures performance on metrics that are most important to customers, and net promoter score (NPS), which measures likely spread through positive referrals, to study satisfaction among adopters of locally managed marine areas (LMMAs) in northeastern Madagascar. Our results identified 4 attributes of LMMAs that adopters viewed as important but rated as worsening over time (funding and livestock provided by a nongovernmental organization, conflict in the village, and connections with others). Adopters considered control over resources and fisheries restrictions important and high performing. Villagers rated their quality of life since adopting LMMAs positively on average, but NPS returned a negative result overall and a strongly negative score for nonleaders. Our findings can be used to improve the design and management of LMMAs, inform pre‐ and postproject impact assessments to minimize negative impacts from conservation initiatives, and increase the spread of conservation initiatives. More broadly, this study presents a novel outlook for increasing the adoption of conservation initiatives by framing adopters of conservation initiatives as akin to customers whose perceptions of conservation initiatives matter inherently and because of their power to influence the spread of conservation initiatives.