As conceptual and theoretical discussions on environmental valuation approaches have advanced there is growing interest in the impact that valuation has on decision making. The perceived legitimacy of the outputs of valuation studies is seen as one factor influencing their impact on policy decisions. One element of this is ensuring that participants of valuation processes see the results as legitimate and would be willing to accept decisions based on these findings. Here, we test the perceived legitimacy to participants of two (...) approaches to deliberative monetary valuation, deliberated preferences and Deliberative Democratic Monetary Valuation, in the context of marine planning in the Clyde estuary in Scotland. We compare and contrast deliberated preference and deliberative democratic monetary valuation and track their emergence as responses to critiques of conventional stated preference approaches. We then present the results of our case study where we found that deliberative democratic monetary valuation produced valuations that were perceived as more legitimate that deliberated preference as the basis for decision making by those involved in the valuation process. (shrink)

Scholars have critiqued mainstream economic approaches to environmental valuation for decades. These critiques have intensified with the increased prominence of environmental valuation in decision-making. This paper has three goals. First, we summarise prominent critiques of monetary valuation, drawing mostly on the work of Clive Spash, who worked extensively on cost–benefit analysis early in his career and then became one of monetary valuation's most thorough and ardent critics. Second, we, as a group of scholars who study relational values, describe how relational (...) values research engages with and addresses many of the critiques of monetary valuation. Third, we offer suggestions for relational values research that continues and deepens its ability to respond to critiques of monetary valuation and contributes to transformative change towards sustainability. (shrink)

Multi-stakeholder initiatives have been praised as vehicles for tackling complex sustainability issues, but their success relies on the reconciliation of stakeholders’ divergent perspectives. We yet lack a thorough understanding of the micro-level mechanisms by which stakeholders can deal with these differences. To develop such understanding, we examine what frames—i.e., mental schemata for making sense of the world—members of MSIs use during their discussions on sustainability questions and how these frames are deliberated through social interactions. Whilst prior framing research has focussed (...) on between-frame conflicts, we offer a different perspective by examining how and under what conditions actors use shared frames to tackle ‘within-frame conflicts’ on views that stand in the way of joint decisions. Observations of a deliberative environmental valuation workshop and interviews in an MSI on the protection of peatlands—ecosystems that contribute to carbon retention on a global scale—demonstrated how the application and deliberation of shared frames during micro-level interactions resulted in increased salience, elaboration, and adjustment of shared frames. We interpret our findings to identify characteristics of deliberation mechanisms in the case of within-frame conflicts where shared frames dominate the discussions, and to delineate conditions for such dominance. Our findings contribute to an understanding of collaborations in MSIs and other organisational settings by demonstrating the utility of shared frames for dealing with conflicting views and suggesting how shared frames can be activated, fostered and strengthened. (shrink)

Issues of interest, identity and values intertwine in environmental conflicts, creating challenges that cannot generally be overcome using rationalities grounded in generalised argumentation and abstraction. To address the growing need to engage interests and identities along with plural values in the conservation of biodiversity and ecological systems, we introduce the concept of ‘appropriateness of actions’ and ground it in a relational understanding of environmental ethics. A determination of appropriateness for actions comes from combining outputs from value elicitation with those of (...) interest and identity negotiation in ways that are salient to specific people and their relationships to specific places. Drawing on the Blue Mountain Forest Partnership in the Pacific Northwest, we propose factors of success for supporting appropriate actions: 1) understanding context and identifying key stakeholders; 2) surfacing a diversity of interests and building system-level trust; 3) building empathy for different identities grounded in specific places; 4) eliciting diverse values and seeking to understand their links to worldviews and knowledge systems and; 5) seeking out appropriate actions. (shrink)

Contributing to the cultural ecosystem services literature, this paper draws on the in-depth place narratives of two coastal case-study sites in Wales (UK) to explore how people experience and understand landscape change in relation to their sense of place, and what this means for their wellbeing. Our place narratives reveal that participants understand coastal/intertidal landscapes as complex socio-ecological systems filled with competing legitimate claims that are difficult to manage. Such insights suggest that a focus on diachronic integrity (Holland and O'Neill (...) 1996) within place narratives might offer a route to more socially and culturally acceptable environmental management strategies. (shrink)

The conceptual promise of relational values, theorized as the principles and virtues of human relationships (with other humans and nature), to motivate sustainability may be observed in its rapid uptake in theoretical and policy domains. Both relying on and impacting nature, agriculture has garnered attention among efforts to apply relational values. However, quantitative measures have received little focus in efforts to operationalize relational values. Guided by the assertion that sustainable agriculture is embedded with both relational and instrumental values (i.e., self-interested (...) ends), this study considers theoretical and methodological challenges and offers a pathway to quantitatively measuring relational values within agriculture, focusing specifically on seeds—an agricultural input embedded with plural values. Drawing on 151 survey responses from seed growers in Vermont, this study assesses how relational and instrumental values are reflected among commercial and non-commercial seed growers and are associated with the presence of crop diversity in their farms and gardens. The findings show that those who sell seeds for income have significantly higher relational values, instrumental values, and crop diversity than those who do not sell seeds. Should these findings be confirmed in future studies, potential exists for policy initiatives encouraging market behavior and its governance to express a range of values beyond instrumental ones exclusively. This paper concludes by arguing that all economic exchange is likely embedded with both relational and instrumental values, meaning that policies and programs that activate a range of values will most likely maximize the impacts of the myriad initiatives pursuing sustainable agriculture. (shrink)

AbstractIn many cultures, interactions between humans and plants are rooted in what is called “relational values”—values that derive from relationships and entail reciprocity. In Mexico, biocultural diversity is mirrored in the knowledge and use of some 6500 plant species and the domestication of over 250 Mesoamerican native crop species. This research explores how different sets of values are attributed to plants and how these influence management strategies to maintain plant resources in wild and anthropogenic environments. We ran workshops in two (...) communities in a highly biodiverse region in western Mexico, to ascertain the values and management activities related to important plant resources. The relationship between values attributed to plants and management activities was examined through redundancy analysis. A total of 180 plant resources were mentioned during the workshops, with a broad spectrum of values attributed to them, including material, non-material, and regulatory dimensions. We divided plant management strategies into three general categories of increasing intensity and complexity. We found that participants in the Indigenous community value and manage more wild plant resources than people in the non-Indigenous community. We also identified relationships between plant resource values and the type of management performed; for example, more intensive forms of management, such as sowing seeds, were used for seasonal plants that had a food value. By valuing and managing different sets of plant resources from forest, agricultural plots, and home gardens, people enabled multi-functional landscapes to form, illustrating a key feature of relational values in agroecosystems, which promotes both conservation and domestication of plants. (shrink)