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The ecosystem system services framework has potential to help clarify wildlife management challenges at the single species scale, but existing methods struggle to capture the complex values and tradeoffs at play in human–wildlife interactions. We worked with community scientists to gather and use stories (n = 150) as a source of ecosystem services data about living alongside eastern coyotes (Canis latrans var) in rural Vermont, United States. Our a priori ecosystem service assessment showed that human–coyote interactions can have simultaneous positive and negative human well‐being impacts at both the sample scale and for individual interviewees. Our research identified emergent themes that lent insight into how interviewees justified different kinds of relationships with coyotes. We applied a tradeoffs lens to evaluate three policy options based on their potential to mitigate ecosystem disservices and maximize ecosystem services from human–coyote interactions. We found that ecosystem services assessment rooted in a dataset of stories revealed policy‐relevant understanding of value conflicts and alignments at the sample scale without overshadowing the nuances of individual interviewees' experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• This critical interpretive synthesis explores diverse knowledge forms that convey cultural benefits of ES. • A typology of knowledge forms arose through synthesis, including enacted knowledge and translated knowledge. • Relational and holistic value aspects were best conveyed with enacted forms and contextualized translations. • Our synthesizing argument calls for a shift from ES-knowledge integration toward learning opportunities. • An Opportunities Map helps locate pathways for decision-makers to learn from ES cultural-benefits-knowledge. Many cultural benefits of ecosystem services (ES) are difficult to capture in standard ES assessments. Scholars and practitioners often respond to this gap by seeking to develop new scientific methods to capture and integrate the plural values associated with diverse cultural benefits categories. This increasing emphasis on value pluralism represents an essential step toward recognitional justice within ES theory and practice. However, current approaches continue to rest on the assumption that ES-knowledge is only made available to decision-makers through scientific documentation. As a result, scholars and decision-makers fail to account for the role of knowledge pluralism as a core element of recognitional justice, and a key enabling factor for meaningful consideration of the plural values linked to cultural benefits of ES. In this paper, we contribute to a pluralist theory of cultural-benefits-knowledge, and ES-knowledge more broadly. Using a critical interpretive synthesis of environmental management literature, we conceptualize a wider range of knowledge forms that convey cultural benefits, based on the knowledge-as-practice concept in addition to the knowledge-as-product concept more familiar to Western actors. As part of the synthesis, we explore when and how diverse forms of cultural-benefits-knowledge intersect with decision-making processes, and the value aspects and categories of cultural benefits most frequently conveyed by each form of knowledge. Our synthesizing argument offers a critique of the concept of "ES-knowledge-use," proposing a shift in focus toward "learning opportunities" that exist across phases of decision-making. We demonstrate that attention to a greater diversity of knowledge forms (knowledge pluralism), and a fuller spectrum of opportunities to integrate them (learning opportunities) can support more meaningful consideration of the plural values associated with cultural benefits of ES (value pluralism). In combination, attention to knowledge pluralism and value pluralism can help bring the ES approach into alignment with environmental justice through the recognition and legitimization of multiple identities, well-beings, and human-nature relationships, as reflected in meaningful consideration of the diverse cultural benefits of ES. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]