Pluralism drawing on core social scientific concepts would facilitate integrated sustainability research.

Relational value (RV) has recently been introduced as a third class of values for understanding values of nature and are thought to sit alongside more familiar axiological categories such as instrumental and intrinsic value. The concept has quickly gained ground in and promises to better capture how people and collectives perceive of their wellbeing and make choices that involve the natural world. While the idea of relational value is not without merits, its initial and current conceptualization raises questions about how it relates to existing value concepts. Here, we start from an interdisciplinary perspective and delineate how the concept can contribute to addressing problems in three fields that deal with environmental values in different ways: environmental ethics; ecosystem services valuation; and environmental psychology. We provide an overview of value concepts in each field and show how relational value has been described or applied. Our analysis shows that value concepts are used to solve different problems in the three fields, and these differences have implications for how relational value can be framed and situated in values theory. These differences involve e.g., the descriptive question of how people value nature versus the normative questions of why nature should be valued. We show how the concept can be seen as solving the problem of narrow conceptualizations of intrinsic and instrumental value in ecosystem services valuation and suggest that RV can be conceived of as an epistemological framing rather than a values concept. The concept also has potential to function as a 'boundary object' to provide cross-fertilization of disciplinary perspectives.

Traditionally, interdisciplinarity has been taken to require conceptual or theoretical integration. However, in the emerging field of sustainability science this kind of integration is often lacking. Indeed sometimes it is regarded as an obstacle to interdisciplinarity. Drawing on examples from sustainability science, we show that problem-feeding, i.e. the transfer of problems, is a common and fruitful-looking way of connecting disparate disciplines and establishing interdisciplinarity. We identify two species of problem-feeding: unilateral and bilateral. Which of these is at issue depends on whether solutions to the problem are fed back to the discipline in which the problem originated. We suggest that there is an interesting difference between the problem-feeding approach to interdisciplinarity and the traditional integrative perspective suggested by among others Erich Jantsch and his colleagues. The interdisciplinarity resulting from problem-feeding between researchers can be local and temporary and does not require collaboration between proximate disciplines. By contrast, to make good sense of traditional integrative interdisciplinarity we must arguably associate it with a longer-term, global form of close, interdisciplinary collaboration.

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