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Relational values reflect the qualities of the relationships between humans and nature, such as care, social bonding, place attachment and spiritual meanings. In this perspective article, we argue that understanding relational values is vital for nature conservation, and we identify how incorporation of these values may function as leverage points for achieving more effective nature policy. We discuss the distinctive features of the concept of relational values and elaborate how relational values strongly influence people’s perceptions of, engagement with and action for nature. Relational values can also provide important deep leverage points for policy interventions aiming to support citizen’s contribution to nature conservation, to strengthen biodiversity policy and the relationship between people and nature. Based on three realms of leverage (re-think, re-structure and re-connect), we distinguish six routes through which relational values can be integrated in policies and practices of nature conservation: (1) incorporation of pluralized meanings of nature; (2) the uptake of relational language in policy discourse; (3) a prioritization of landscape-based policy; (4) empowering citizens in nature conservation; (5) re-orienting nature education to stimulate people’s personal bond with nature; and (6) using digital technology to stimulate new relationships with nature.

Contains fulltext : 169530.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) Despite ongoing efforts to motivate politicians and publics in Europe regarding nature conservation, biodiversity continues to decline. Monetary valuation of ecosystem services appears to be insufficient to motivate people, suggesting that non-monetary values have a crucial role to play. There is insufficient information about the motivations of actors who have been instrumental in successful conservation projects. We investigated the motivations underlying these biodiversity actors using the ranking of cards and compared the results with the rankings of motivations of a second group of actors with more socially related interests. For both groups of actors, their action relating to biodiversity was supported in general by two groups of motivations related to living a meaningful life and moral values. The non-biodiversity actors also noted that their action relating to biodiversity rested more on beauty, place attachment and intrinsic values in comparison with their main non-biodiversity interests. Our results have implications for environmental policy and biodiversity conservation in that the current tendency of focusing on the economic valuation of biodiversity fails to address the motivations of successful actors, thereby failing to motivate nature conservation on an individual level. 10 p.

The assessment of total economic value has become a pragmatic and popular approach in nature valuation, yet criticisms have been raised. One major point of critique is that total economic value bases the monetary value of ecosystems purely on the flow of human benefits of services of ecosystems and consequently ignores questions of sustainable use of natural capital per se. This paper explains why total economic value by itself is in principle an inadequate concept to guide sustainable use of ecosystems and gives an overview of essential ecological theory that needs to be taken into account in addition to total economic value to fully include ecosystem sustainability. The paper concludes with a framework for combining ecological theory with economic valuation. The key elements here are theoretical ecological insights about ecosystem resilience and portfolio theory which offers an economic perspective on investment in biodiversity. Portfolio theory puts total economic value in a framework where investment in biodiversity is expanded to cover functional diversity and mobile link species in order to maintain ecosystem resilience and so fosters sustainable use of ecosystems. © 2013 Elsevier B.V.

Understanding the causes of land use change is of great importance for issues of tropical deforestation, agricultural development and biodiversity conservation. Many quantitative studies, therefore, aim to link land use change to its causal `driving forces.¿ The epistemology of virtually all these studies is inductive, searching for correlations within relatively large, sometimes spatially explicit, datasets. This can be sound science but we here aim to exemplify that there is also scope for more deductive approaches that test a pre-defined explanatory theory. The paper first introduces the principles and merits of inductive and more deductive types of land use modeling. It then presents one integrated causal model that is subsequently specified to predict land use in an area in northeastern Philippines in a deductive manner, and tested against the observed land use in that area. The same set of land use data is also used in an inductive (multinomial regression) approach. With a goodness-of-prediction of 70% of the deductive model and a goodness-of-fit of 77% of the inductive model, both perform equally well, statistically. Because the deductive model explicitly contains not only the causal factors but also the causal mechanisms that explain land use, the deductive model then provides a more truly causal, as well as more theory-connected, understanding of land use. This provides land use scholarship with an invitation to add more deductive (theory-driven and theory-building) daring to its methodological repertoire.