Revealing ecological processes or imposing social rationalities? The politics of bounding and measuring ecosystem services

Making sense of environmental values: a typology of concepts

“…Some scholars argue that a pyramid of biological needs can act as a universal framework for ordering human goals (Maslow 1943, Wallace 2007, whereas others create distinctions such as environmental/social/economic or ethical/cognitive/ aesthetic when seeking to group people's priorities (Vugteveen et al 2010, Seymour et al 2011. There is always a risk that analystframed value items will "miss the point" in a particular setting (Tadaki et al 2015).…”

“…For example, how conservation value is operationalized through specific metrics has implications for which management interventions are deemed necessary in order to realize the objective (Karp et al 2015). There may be agreement that conservation is a desirable societal goal, but the specific ways in which it is measured has consequences with potential winners and losers (Tadaki et al 2015).…”

“…This is predicated on a theoretical and ethical shift toward thinking about values through local languages and categories rather than starting with or imposing "top down" frameworks of value (Norton and Hannon 1997, Klain et al 2014, Tadaki et al 2015. Of course, there are still the risks and responsibilities involved in translation.…”

“…The first step is to select the social or ecological goal to be evaluated, which effectively bounds the analysis by allowing certain ecological components in and excluding others (Tadaki et al 2015). The second step involves the specification of the goal in terms of metrics (and sometimes thresholds), so that a particular environment (or part of an environment) can be represented as a metric contributing to realizing that goal.…”

“…Citizens could be involved in the selection of social goals through focus groups , but more often these goals are selected based on the scientific literature or expert judgment (Daw et al 2011). The extent to which the selected goals are meaningful to local communities is an open question that deserves asking (Tadaki et al 2015).…”