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Deliberative Monetary Valuation

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In deliberative monetary valuation (DMV), small groups of participants explore their values for different policy options through a process of reasoned discourse. Two main approaches to DMV exist: deliberated preferences (DP) methods, and deliberative democratic monetary valuation (DDMV). DP aims to address the information gaps many valuation participants face when being asked to consider complex goods, such as biodiversity and ecosystem services, and while this may provide an opportunity to discuss broader values, preferences are assumed to ultimately be utilitarian (‘weak’ value plurality). DDMV embraces ‘strong’ value plurality and elicits group values to directly establish value to society through deliberation and negotiation. The two approaches are contrasted in terms of the perceived aim of deliberation, conceptualisation of value, approaches to value aggregation, rationality assumptions, conception of representativeness, and value indicators used. Issues surrounding power, institutions and notions of legitimacy are also discussed. Ultimately, DMV reflects the tension inherent in democratic decision-making resulting from the need for trade-offs (e.g. through budgets) and for incorporating a wide range of values and interests into decisions. With further empirical research, innovative process design, and practical protocols, DMV can become an effective tool for democratising valuation and more sustainable and equitable decisions.
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Routledge Handbook of Ecological Economics (Ed. C. Spash)
Chapter 34
Deliberative Monetary Valuation
Jasper O. Kenter
Introduction
Deliberative Monetary Valuation (DMV) encapsulates a range of approaches that integrate
participation, reflection, discussion and social learning into monetary valuation of
environmental and other public goods, or budgetary decisions relating to provisioning of such
goods. The term was first employed by Spash (2007, 2008a). In DMV, small groups of
participants explore values and preferences for different policy options through a process of
reasoned discourse. DMV has developed as a critical response to more established valuation
methods, particularly the contingent valuation method (CVM) and cost-benefit analysis
(CBA), which have been challenged both by ecological complexities and the intricacies and
multidimensionality of human values. DMV has also been advocated as a more ‘democratic’
approach to valuation that can enhance the perceived legitimacy of policy making, as a result
of increased public participation and better understanding of values (Howarth & Wilson,
2006). Others have used DMV to work with participants with limited formal education and
literacy, and have pointed out that group-based, rather than individual/household, decisions
and shared values are the norm in many parts of the world, especially for managing public
goods (Kenter et al., 2011). Thus there are a range of different motivations for DMV that
shape how it is put into practice.
In the next section, I discuss some of these motivations, key issues facing environmental
valuation and how different values come into play. I then consider different DMV approaches
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divided in two categories: deliberated preferences (DP) which enhance neoclassical economic
valuation, and deliberative democratic monetary valuation (DDMV) which elicits group
values to directly establish value to society. The final sections discuss future directions and
provide concluding remarks.
Deliberation and challenges to valuation
While DMV is not limited to environmental issues, the discussion around how deliberation
might benefit valuation has been most pronounced in the environmental field. Reasons for
environment valuation include: improving policy and project appraisal, incorporating natural
capital into financial accounts, informing decisions around trade-offs and awareness raising.
A key idea is to compare the relative importance of the environment to other private and
public goods with the aim of evaluating different policy options and informing decision-
making.
In the context of valuation, the terms ‘value’ and ‘values’ can have different meanings across
different dimensions, including the concept of value, the value provider, scale, intention and
elicitation process (Kenter et al., 2015). I distinguish three types of value: transcendental,
contextual and indicators. Transcendental values transcend specific contexts. They are values
in the sense of guiding principles and life goals that shape the way we live our lives, e.g.,
enjoyment, honesty, social status, security and harmony with nature. Transcendental values
help shape contextual values, which express opinions about the importance of particulars,
e.g., where protecting a wetland is judged more important than developing it, or that a
wetland protects the coast is judged a better reason than that it provides food for seabirds.
Value indicators provide a measure of importance e.g., the maximum willingness to pay
(WTP) of a valuing agent to protect a wetland.
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These different concepts can be expressed through different value providers, including:
individuals;
groups of people, such as in a valuation workshop (group values);
different geographical communities or communities of practice (communal values);
societies and cultures as a whole (societal and cultural values).
Values can also be distinguished in terms of an individual and/or societal scale, be self-
regarding and/or other-regarding, and be elicited through deliberative and/or non-deliberative
processes. Valuation, broadly defined, involves a wide range of methods—depending on what
type of values are targeted—including: cultural-historic document analysis, geographic
mapping, psychological surveys, questionnaire-based and qualitative social research, and
monetary valuation (Kenter, 2016a). As depicted by the grey arrows in Figure 34.1, the choice
of process for eliciting values and the type of value provider will influence the values
articulated in terms of concept, intention and scale.
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Figure 34.1: Dimensions and Types of Values. Source: adapted from Kenter et al. (2015)
Neoclassical environmental economic valuation is focussed on individual contextual values
and value indicators, ignoring the values considered by other disciplines as shared or social
values; indicated in Figure 34.1 in italic font. It assumes transcendental values are completely
reflected in contextual values, and communal, societal and cultural values are fully reflected
in individual values. In neoclassical economics, whether something has value to an individual
depends on his or her wants, and these wants are expressed as preferences for one thing over
another within different contexts, where individuals are assumed to maximise satisfaction of
these preferences through rational choice. The framework of what constitutes valid wants has
been extended to a concept termed ‘total economic value’, which is conceived of as including
such things as altruistic values (valuing something for the sake of another), bequest values
(valuing something for the sake of future generations) and existence values (valuing knowing
that something will continue to exist regardless of its human use) [see Chapter 23].
Elicitation process
Deliberated values
Non-deliberated values
Value intention
Other-
regarding
values
Self-regarding
values
Value
dimensions
Value scale
Value to
society
Value to
individual
Value concept
Transcendental
values
Contextual
values
Value
Indicators
Value provider
Societal & cultural
values
Communal
values
Individual
values
Group
values
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Nonetheless, these values are still considered self-regarding and founded upon the personal
satisfaction that an individual gains. That this satisfaction can be traded-off with any other
good is taken as unquestioned and doing so equated to being rational [see Chapter 22].
Finally, value to society is equated with the aggregate of individual values. However, when
creating societal values from individual values, further assumptions are necessary to address
how to aggregate within dimensions of valuation (i.e. how much does each individual
count?), and across dimensions of valuation (i.e. how are different value criteria to be made
commensurate?). For example, consider the appraisal of a hypothetical mining project
proposed in a local area where traditional people have historical rights. There are many
different dimensions of value that might be considered, including the: internal costs and
benefits of the project, livelihoods of people, cultural impact of the project and impacts on
local biodiversity. The environmental and social impacts would need to be valued in
monetary terms to be included in a cost-benefit analysis (CBA). In theory, this would then
enable people who suffer negatively from the mining project to be compensated for
environmental damage and impacts on livelihoods and culture. If the benefits outweigh the
costs, after compensation, the project would be ‘efficient’ in the sense that it would deliver a
net economic welfare value to society. Typically compensation is not actually paid but the
hypothetical possibility of a welfare improvement (a potential Pareto improvement) is judged
adequate by economists (called the Kaldor-Hicks criteria).
The neoclassical framework requires the idea that the ecological, social and cultural
dimensions of value are substitutable, commensurable and can be fully compensated if lost
[see Chapter 22]. Such compensation is assumed to be just or ethical if the result is that no
one is made worse-off and someone better-off (the Pareto criteria). Implicitly this ethical
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criteria assumes that there exists an accepted mechanism for aggregating values. However,
this means that the property rights of local people can be trumped by the collective net social
benefit, or the poor by the rich. Moreover, unless all parties completely agree about how
different dimensions of value should be traded-off against each other, there can be no single
conclusion as to the scenario that might deliver the highest net value to society, and the
valuation question is inherently a political one.
The neoclassical perspective thus models values as individual, preference utilitarian and their
aggregation as utility maximising social value. The critique posed by advocates of DMV has
focused on three things:
i. people often lack clearly defined preferences, especially when dealing with complex
and unfamiliar entities, concepts and scenarios;
ii. equating value with satisfying individual, self-regarding preferences excludes broader
shared and plural values; and
iii. value to society should be established through debate rather than an arbitrary technical
procedure for aggregating individual preferences.
In terms of the first issue, much of the public appears to be unsure about the meaning of
environmental concepts, such as biodiversity (Spash and Hanley, 1995). Group discussion can
then be a useful tool to help participants become more familiar with the environmental goods
they are being asked to value (Christie et al., 2006). This concern was the main motivation for
some of the first empirical DMV papers, where DMV was conceptualised as a ‘market stall’
where by analogy participants would be able to ‘browse’ (i.e. become familiar with the goods
they were asked to value) before stating their WTP (Macmillan et al., 2002). Lack of
understanding and absence of preformed preferences is even more of an issue for habitats that
are unfamiliar to respondents, such as many marine habitats (Spash 2002). A recent DMV
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study with scuba divers and sea anglers demonstrated that even such expert participants, who
were much more familiar with marine habitats than the general public, lacked well-developed
preferences, but they were able to develop habitat-specific preferences through group
discussion (Kenter et al., 2016a).
However, uncertainty over values goes beyond familiarity with the objects of value. Even
those with expert knowledge are still faced with the complexity of social ecological systems.
As a consequence, projecting trajectories of change with any kind of certainty is impossible,
and scenarios harbour unknown risks. Analysis involves incomplete representation of systems
and what to include/exclude requires researcher judgement. From this perspective—linking to
post-normal science [Chapter 28]—the role of deliberation goes beyond merely increasing
respondent familiarity with an object of study. The complexities, uncertainties and risks of the
policy options need to be taken into consideration along with how they impact on values. So
far, no DMV studies have attempted this, although some have linked with systems thinking
(Kenter, 2016b; Orchard-Webb et al., 2016).
The second argument for deliberation is that values are often not individualistic, self-
interested and utilitarian, and monetary values reflect a variety of motivations. For example,
Desvousges et al. (1993)—studying WTP for wire-nets to reduce bird mortality in oil
companies’ waste oil settling ponds—found differences in what participants considered their
WTP represented included it being a: consumer benefit, charitable contribution, signal for
their moral or political beliefs, and made-up number. Values are often multi-faceted,
particularly in situations where costs and benefits are less straightforward to grasp. Their
incorporation in CBA is then problematic because they may consist of a mix of transcendental
and contextual values, norms, attitudes, concerns and beliefs that are incommensurable. Thus
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there is a need for a different approach to valuation, where participants can discuss their
transcendental values including considerations such as equity, fairness, rights and
responsibilities, alongside discussions of costs, benefits and trade-offs, uncertainties and risks,
in order to come to a more meaningful constitution of their contextual values. Next, these
contextual values need to be translated into a weighing of the options or issues at stake. From
this perspective, valuation is a shared social process of value construction (Kenter et al.,
2015).
This brings us to the third argument to support deliberation, which concerns the theoretical
difficulty of aggregating values. This is a problem long recognised in economics going back
to Arrow’s (1950) claim that there is no logically infallible way to aggregate the preferences
of individuals that can lead to a single consistent ranking of policy alternatives. Economists
make value laden decisions in CBA about the distribution of property rights, and who counts
and how much. Economic analysis implicitly supports the rich and powerful by basing
decisions on the status quo because, in monetary terms, they will have the largest WTP and
the most to lose. For example, take a hypothetical CBA about two locations for a waste
incineration: either near a well-off neighbourhood or social housing project. Economic
analysis based on the likely impact on house prices (i.e., hedonic pricing) will favour placing
it near the social housing, despite the higher population density meaning more people are
affected. Adjustments to such CBA calculations can be made but this requires deliberation
over what should constitute alternative assumptions and ethical criteria.
A further issue with aggregation is that self-interested preferences may have little
correspondence to the good of society as a whole. As Mauss (1954: 75) states:
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“The mere pursuit of individual ends is harmful to the ends and peace of the whole [...]
and hence in the end to the individual”.
Mauss distinguishes a group morality that exists separately from individual preferences,
which Sagoff (1986) calls public or shared values. Both authors consider that the public good
should be derived directly from shared values rather than through aggregated individual
preferences. Sagoff points out that many individual preferences are sadistic, envious, racist,
unjust, coercive or related to addictions. There are philosophical and practical problems in
determining whether such preferences truly reduce well-being, or reflect genuinely divergent
preferences. However, even for ‘normal’ consumer preferences there is no self-evident reason
for taking the maximisation of preference satisfaction as equating with social good. Sagoff
(1986: 303) asks:
“Why is it good in itself that a person who wants a Mercedes succeeds in getting one?
Having a preference is a reason for the person who has it to try to satisfy it. Why should
it be a goal of public policy, however, to satisfy that preference?”
There is also a literature critiquing the basis for calling upon preferences as the defining
reference point for determining environmental policy (see Spash, 2008b).
In summary, the maximisation of social welfare cannot be equated with simply allocating
resources to those with the highest WTP. Instead, evaluating the public good requires a
deliberative process that can go beyond a simple preference based frame of decision-making.
Deliberated preferences and democratic valuation
Depending on whether and how DMV studies aim to address the issues outlined above—
familiarity and complexity, value plurality, and the need for deliberation to establish social
value—they can be placed on a spectrum between two archetypal approaches. These are the
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approaches I term DP and DDMV. Table 34.1 provides an overview of key areas of
difference between the two, which will be discussed here in some detail. So far, almost all
empirical studies can be located at the DP end of the spectrum, and thus the characterisation
of DDMV is mostly theoretical.
Table 34.1: Two Archetypes of DMV and their Properties
DP
DDMV
Conception of deliberation
Informing preferences
through group discussion
Deliberating on plural values
to consider public good
Issues the approach
addresses
Familiarity
Weak value plurality
Complexity and uncertainty
Strong value plurality
Value aggregation
Means of establishing
value to society
Aggregation of individual
utility
Deliberation and negotiation
Value concept focus
Contextual & indicators
Transcendental, contextual &
indicators
Value provider
Individual in group setting
Group
Rationality assumptions
Instrumental
Communicative
Conception of
representativeness
Statistical
Statistical or political
Scale of value and value
indicators used
Value to individual
(individual WTP or fair
price)
Value to individual (fair
price);
Value to society
(deliberated social WTP)
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DP: Preference economisation
DP approaches focus on providing research participants time to discuss and think about their
preferences, to ease the respondent’s cognitive burden, something that Lo and Spash (2012)
call preference economisation. Discussions are primarily focused on nurturing value
elicitation at the individual level. Values are reflected as individual WTP, analysed and
aggregated to the societal scale using econometric approaches. While nominally DP, as in
conventional stated preferences studies, focuses upon eliciting contextual values, nonetheless
there is a weak form of value plurality. That is, in practice, discussion rarely limits itself to
information, and the deliberation provides space for transcendental values and non-utilitarian
perspectives. I term this weak value plurality because ultimately participants are asked to
make their judgements solely on the basis of maximising their individual utility. Those who
decide on their WTP in a different way are excluded from the sample as protest voters.
DDMV: Moralisation and democratisation
In DDMV studies the primary focus is on providing a platform for people to deliberate
directly on the public good. DDMV is a structured process where participants consider
benefits and costs of different policy options alongside non-instrumental concerns, including:
deontological motivations such as social norms, rights and duties, virtues such as fairness or
responsibility, and narratives—stories that explain the past but may also express values on
how to move forward. While this process has been termed preference moralisation (Lo and
Spash, 2012), the transcendental values involved are more than just moral values because they
address broader conceptions of what is important in life. These life goals relate to broad sets
of shared communal, cultural and societal values, and also to the relations between
environment and culture. These values are often latent, emphasising the need for explicit
consideration in deliberation. Evaluation in DDMV takes place through communicative rather
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than instrumental rationality, where the common good is conceived of as ultimately a
question of communication and negotiation.
There is yet little evidence on how this might work in practice. There has been only one
DDMV study where participants directly established value to society, involving a single
group of stakeholders in a deliberation on hypothetical policy options for strategic local
development (Orchard-Webb et al. 2016). This demonstrated that participants can indeed set
their individual utility aside in order to negotiate social WTP for policy options that reflect a
range of value types and concerns. The key ground on which to evaluate whether such
valuations are rational is whether participation has been inclusive—all salient perspectives
and interests have been included—and outcomes are not distorted by power relationships
[Chapter 14]. DDMV may lead to ‘aggregation by mutual consent’ (Howarth and Wilson,
2006) in the sense of value convergence, but could also lead to ‘agreement to pay under
disagreement’ (Lo, 2013). The purpose of DDMV in valuation is not to moralise values
towards any specific moral premise, or to create an artificial divide between the ‘I’ and the
‘We’; something criticised by Lo & Spash (2012). The aim is to create a democratic platform
for evaluating options across different types of ethical and practical stances. The deliberative-
democratic nature of the process is that participants decide for themselves which values and
value dimensions are considered and how these are reconciled, enabling what I term strong
value plurality.
Representativeness, power, institutions and legitimacy
Not just the outcomes but also the legitimacy of DMV rests on how key institutional issues
are addressed. This is particularly salient given some of the challenges of deliberative
methods relating managing issue of power within the deliberative process and who is
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represented around the table. DP approaches tend to rely on statistical representativeness,
using traditional quantitative social science sampling approaches, and verifying whether a
sample represents a wider population (most often the public, sometimes specific user groups,
e.g. tourists visiting an area) through social, economic and demographic variables (e.g. age,
income and education level). DDMV studies may follow this approach (e.g. a citizen’s jury
constituted to represent a geographically specific public to deliberate directly on the value to
society of a set of policy options), but they may also undertake a valuation with a group of
stakeholders.
Regardless of the approach taken, unequal social relations and institutions outside of the
valuation setting will influence participants’ ability to voice their opinions and concerns.
There are likely to be differences in terms of social status, political influence, class, education
and experience with deliberation and discussion. This can lead to participants’ failing to
express or adjusting their views under the pressure of power dynamics, or as a result of
perceived social desirability. Questions might also be raised in relation to competence: are
participants able to assess the issues at stake? While these issues can be managed to some
degree through professional facilitation, they also need explicit consideration in designing the
process [see Chapter 33].
In DDMV valuations on the basis of political (as opposed to statistical) representativeness,
legitimacy rests on whether all relevant interests are able to participate. This means that, in
addition to managing internal dynamics of the group process, there is also the need for
rigorous stakeholder analysis. Here, the question may also be asked whether representation
should counterbalance the type of political and institutional biases described above (Fish et
al., 2013). While there are well-developed processes for stakeholder selection (see Reed et al.,
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2009), a challenging issue in the selection of participants is the inevitably subjective character
of the process and the influence this may have on outcomes. Social power of participants (e.g.
expertise or experience) is hard to fully even out by careful process design and facilitation.
For example, in the study by Orchard-Webb et al. (2016) unequal power appeared to steer the
discussion towards pragmatism and the status quo of the current institutional environment.
This could be addressed by under-representing the powerful, or developing a more explicit
process for transformative social ecological change, or one might simply accept that, when
following accepted stakeholder selection processes, democratic valuation processes are likely
to reflect the status quo.
Types of value indicators
As shown in Table 34.2, for both DP and DDMV, the outcome of the DMV process is some
kind of monetary value indicator. Spash (2007) distinguished these as “payment terms” across
two dimensions: the value provider (individual vs. group) and scale (individual vs. societal).
This schematic thus suggests four main types of monetary value indicator: (i) a deliberated
individual WTP, (ii) a ‘fair price’, and a deliberated social WTP (i.e. value to society)
determined by either (iii) individuals or (iv) the group.
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Table 34.2: Types of Value Indicators
Individual
Society
Value
Provider
Individual in
group setting
•Individual WTP/WTA;
interpreted as informed
exchange price or charitable
contribution (e.g., Lienhoop
& Völker 2016)
•Fair price (e.g. Szabó 2011)
•Deliberated social
WTP/WTA; no
empirical studies
Group (vote
or
consensus)
•Fair price (e.g. Kenter et al.,
2011)
•Deliberated group
social WTP/WTA
(e.g. Orchard-Webb
et al, 2016)
Notes: WTA = willingness to accept compensation; WTP = willingess to pay.
Source: adapted with modifications from Spash (2007, 2008a).
DP studies have almost exclusively used individual WTP. DDMV is conceived of as
establishing a pre-aggregated value to society, and thus will most likely focus on social WTP
established on a group basis. What this means in practice is that participants deliberate on
how much they think society should spend on one thing over another, by deciding how much
of a budget should be allocated to the provisioning of different public goods through various
policy options. A fair price payment term asks participants about what they think both others
and themselves should pay. There have been a small number of fair price studies, with group
value providers (Kenter, 2016b; Kenter et al., 2011, 2016a) as conceived in the original
schematic by Spash (2007), or with individually expressed fair prices (Szabó, 2011). These
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can be placed in the middle of the DP-DDMV spectrum, because asking about what people
should pay by definition explicitly brings out transcendental values (characteristic of
DDMV). However, the individual scale of fair prices does not address questions around
aggregation (e.g. should everyone pay a fair price or are some people exempt, should the fair
price be adjusted for those who have a higher income?). All the fair price studies so far have
used econometric means of analysis based on utility models (characteristic of DP).
Future directions
DMV has been advocated by ecological economists in recognition of value plurality, the
aggregation problem, and the complexity and uncertainty associated with understanding,
managing and governing social ecological systems. These are crucial issues that define social
ecological economics and differentiate it from environmental economic approaches;
especially in linking the natural and social worlds. While there has been substantial theorising
around DMV, there have been only a limited number of empirical studies, almost all DP.
These have demonstrated that deliberation can be an effective tool to (in)form peoples’
preferences, and make their WTP more robust. Most are small scale studies, but there has also
been research showing that deliberation can be effective with larger sample sizes (Torres et
al., 2012; Kenter et al., 2011). A key issue for future DP research is how to resolve the tension
inherent in its weak plurality, i.e. between the potential for plurality within deliberation and
the utilitarian constraints around what value terms are acceptable and how values should be
aggregated.
DDMV uses deliberation directly to establish aggregate values, where participants, rather than
the analyst, set the terms of what is socially optimal. However, there is an almost complete
lack of empirical studies that demonstrate how this is done. Notably, the non-monetary,
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analytical-deliberative method that is perhaps most similar to DMV, social/participatory
multi-criteria analysis [Chapter 30], has faced fundamentally the same issues around value
aggregation, and despite having a much broader base of past application, few studies have
addressed the issue. Ultimately, for both DDMV and DP, procedures are needed for
deliberating on not just values but also the rules of the game in terms of how to aggregate
values (Kenter et al., 2016b).
More broadly, the formats for different types of DP and DDMV approaches are widely
divergent, including workshops, structured and unstructured focus groups and citizens’ juries.
Within the DP arena, the market stall format has been used in the United Kingdom, Iceland
and Germany, but this only focuses on informing values, largely ignoring transcendental
values (Lienhoop & Völker, 2016). These have been more explicitly recognised by the
deliberative value formation model (Kenter, Fazey & Reed, 2016) used to underpin some
recent studies. A relevant question is how different process designs, protocols, and modes of
facilitation impact on outcomes. In mainstreaming DMV for use in decision-making,
standardised approaches that also pay attention to such issues as power relations,
representation and inclusivity, are essential.
Concluding remarks
DMV is a method proposed to address a substantial number of challenges to monetary
valuation, but there is tension between theoretical concerns that relate to core issues in social
ecological economics and the empirical work on DMV. Rather than trying to perfectly rhyme
theory and practice, this tension could be a creative one. DMV could be conceived as a
reflection of democratic decision-making with its constant conflicts between utilitarianism
and other ethical and political concerns, and questions such as how to aggregate the values of
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different stakeholders. Policy-making can be seen as a form of DMV through allocation of
budgets, which inevitably involves balancing value for money with deliberation over what
constitutes the public good, involving different types of ethical and political questions,
negotiation and compromise, and reconciling different dimensions of value. Thus DMV, as an
economic method, sits between research and politics. This is the fruitful post-normal,
transdisciplinary space more broadly occupied by social ecological economics, with its
recognition that all research has value connotations. Through further empirical research,
innovative process design, and practical protocols, DMV can become an effective tool for
democratising valuation and achieving more sustainable and equitable decisions.
Key further readings cited
Kenter, J.O., Fazey, I., Reed, M.S. (2016). The Deliberative Value Formation Model.
Ecosystem Services. In press.
Kenter, J.O., O'Brien, L., Hockley, N., Ravenscroft, N., Fazey, I., Irvine, K.N., Reed, M.S.,
Christie, M., Brady, E., Bryce, R., Church, A., Cooper, N., Davies, A., Evely, A., Everard,
M., Fish, R., Fisher, J.A., Jobstvogt, N., Molloy, C., Orchard-Webb, J., Ranger, S., Ryan, M.,
Watson, V., Williams, S. (2015). What are shared and social values of ecosystems?
Ecological Economics 111, 86–99.
Lo, A.Y., Spash, C.L. (2012). Deliberative monetary valuation: in search of a democratic and
value plural approach to environmental policy. Journal of Economic Surveys 27(4): 768–789.
Orchard-Webb, J., Kenter, J.O., Bryce, R., Church, A. (2016). Democratic Deliberative
Monetary Valuation to implement the Ecosystems Approach. Ecosystem Services. In press.
Other literature cited
Arrow, K. (1950). A difficulty in the concept of social welfare. Journal of Political Economy
58: 328–346.
Christie, M., Hanley, N., Warren, J., Murphy, K., Wright, R., Hyde, T. (2006). Valuing the
diversity of biodiversity. Ecological Econonomic 58: 304–317.
Desvousges, W.H., Johnson, F.R., Dunford, R.W., Hudson, S.P., Wilson, K.N. (1993).
Measuring natural resource damages with contingent valuation: tests of validity and
reliability, in: Hausman, J.A. (ed.), Contingent Valuation: a Critical Assessment (pp. 91–164)
New York: North Holland Press.
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Fish, R., Winter, M., Oliver, D., Chadwick, D., Hodgson, C., Heathwaite, A. (2013).
Employing the citizens' jury technique to elicit reasoned public judgments about
environmental risk: insights from an inquiry into the governance of microbial water pollution.
Journal of Environmental Planning and Management 1–21.
Howarth, R.B., Wilson, M.A. (2006). A theoretical approach to deliberative valuation:
Aggregation by mutual consent. Land Economics 82: 1–16.
Kenter, J.O. (2016a). Deliberative and Non-Monetary Valuation, in: Potschin, M., Haines-
Young, R., Fish, R., Turner, R.K. (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Ecosystem Services.
London: Routledge.
Kenter, J.O. (2016b). Integrating deliberative choice experiments, systems modelling and
participatory mapping to assess shared values of ecosystem services. Ecosystem Services. In
press.
Kenter, J.O., Jobstvogt, N., Watson, V., Irvine, K., Christie, M., Bryce, R. (2016a). The
impact of information, value-deliberation and group-based decision-making on values for
ecosystem services: integrating deliberative monetary valuation and storytelling. Ecosystem
Services. In press.
Kenter, J.O., Raymond, C., Christie, Bryce, R., Cooper, N.M., Hockley, N., Irvine, K.N.,
O'Brien, L., Orchard-Webb, J., Ravenscroft, N., Tett, P., Watson, V. (2016b). Shared values
and deliberative valuation: Future directions. Ecosystem Services. In press.
Kenter, J.O., Hyde, T., Christie, M., Fazey, I. (2011). The importance of deliberation in
valuing ecosystem services in developing countries—Evidence from the Solomon Islands.
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... These include non-utilitarian, deontological and virtuous motives that are shared or socially contrived and by nature need to be brought out through deliberation (Kenter et al., 2015;Kenter, 2016;Kenter, 2017). In particular, transcendental values underscore the social and/or public good (e.g., ethical principles and desirable end states) as opposed to individual preferences that are contingent upon utility maximization (i.e., the assumption that humans seek to maximize individual gains, hence, act on self-regarding preferences) ( Fig. 1) (see: Baveye et al., 2013;Gómez-Baggethun et al., 2014;Kallis et al., 2007: 16;Kenter, 2017;Wilson and Howarth, 2002). Particularly under circumstances of uncertainty, such as climate change, and given that risk-taking is an inherently social, political and ethical consideration, the need arises to supplement the methods of economic analyses and monetary valuation to avoid political perils (Kenter, 2017;Kenter, 2016). ...
... In particular, transcendental values underscore the social and/or public good (e.g., ethical principles and desirable end states) as opposed to individual preferences that are contingent upon utility maximization (i.e., the assumption that humans seek to maximize individual gains, hence, act on self-regarding preferences) ( Fig. 1) (see: Baveye et al., 2013;Gómez-Baggethun et al., 2014;Kallis et al., 2007: 16;Kenter, 2017;Wilson and Howarth, 2002). Particularly under circumstances of uncertainty, such as climate change, and given that risk-taking is an inherently social, political and ethical consideration, the need arises to supplement the methods of economic analyses and monetary valuation to avoid political perils (Kenter, 2017;Kenter, 2016). Furthermore, there is a need to capture the intangible values and the contextual nuances. ...
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... These methods aim to uncover individual and collective values and perceptions of ecosystem services beyond monetary measures, emphasising those aspects of river ecosystem that are important to people. This integration highlights transcendental sociocultural values and their connection to principles of good governance, such as equity and inclusiveness (Irvine et al. 2016;Kenter 2017;Peck and Khirfan 2021). By applying different methodologies, such as public participation geographical information systems (Garcia et al. 2018), importance-performance analysis (Lee et al. 2020), the SolVes model (Zhang et al. 2021a, b) and the deliberative Q-method combined with focus group (Peck and Khirfan 2021), the studies identified participants' behaviours when it comes to the importance of urban ecosystem services (Lee et al 2020;Peck and Khirfan 2021) and how environmental variables affect the social valuation of services in urban stream corridors (Garcia et al. 2018) and rivers (Zhang et al 2021a, b). ...
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... The socioeconomic value produced in the reports, expressed in monetary and non-monetary units, lies outside the neoclassical market, whereby the transaction of money is central to the definition of value and whereby everything can translate into a monetary amount (Kenter 2017). In contrast, within economic sociology, it is presupposed that in all markets, value is a complex construct which starts with the social (Beckert and Aspers 2011) and that value determination is always a part of social practices. ...
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... After a short break, stakeholders were given an overview of the current Environmental Land Management Scheme (ELMS) and were asked to discuss payment options and terms of potential future environmental land management and agri-environment schemes with regard to peatlands, in two breakout rooms. The structure accorded with an ecological economic environmental valuation approach (Kenter, 2017;Orchard-Webb et al., 2016) and was designed on the basis of the Deliberative Value Formation model ), a conceptual model that outlines the key factors of influence and potential outcomes of deliberative valuation processes. The breakout discussions used virtual pin boards and were each facilitated by a researcher. ...
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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.
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