Deliberative and Non-Monetary Valuation: Routledge Handbook of Ecosystem Services

There is an increasing interest in methods that can understand our values of ecosystem services in broad and multidimensional way. This chapter discusses a range of deliberative, analytical-deliberative, psychological and interpretive approaches to value the environment. Deliberative methods allow people to ponder, debate and negotiate their values, which can inform, moralise and democratise the valuation process. Analytical-deliberative approaches combine deliberative methods with more formal decision-support tools. Interpretive methods help us understand the narratives of places and what they mean to us as individuals and to our communities and culture. Psychological methods can survey the multi-faceted nature of how ecosystem services contribute to human well-being, and can also investigate our deeper held, ‘transcendental’ values. The way we approach valuation impacts on the type of values that are highlighted. Embracing values as a pluralistic concept means that, to comprehensively value ecosystem services, we need to embrace a diversity of methods to assess them.