‘Civic conversations’ facilitated by social media can help to reshape the relationship between citizens and local government

Amidst heated contemporary policy debates about the shifting roles and responsibilities of local government and citizen-local state relations, it is timely to ask if social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter afford opportunities for new forms of interaction. Nick Ellison and Jo Orchard-Webb explore the idea of ‘civic conversations’ as a means of understanding the potential role that social media might play in re-shaping localized political/civic engagement between citizens and local authorities

21st century catch toolkit: practical approaches for sustainable inshore fishing communities

The 21st Century Catch Toolkit is a product of the INTERREG IVa 2 Seas project GIFS (Geography of Inshore Fishing and Sustainability). Work on the GIFS project was completed between January 2012 and September 2014 and was undertaken by a collaboration of six partners from four European countries bordering the Southern North Sea and English Channel. GIFS aimed to understand and capture the social, economic and cultural importance of inshore fishing to better inform fisheries policy, coastal regeneration strategies and sustainable community development. The project has involved a range of research projects, regeneration activities and case studies across southern England, northern France, Flanders and the southern Netherlands. GIFS partners have worked with local stakeholders and communities to explore the geographical diversity and similarities of fishing ports, harbours and people along the Channel and Southern North Sea. This toolkit is a product of that collaboration which provides useful findings and advice on how to value the social, economic and cultural importance of inshore fishing today

Shared values and deliberative valuation:Future directions

Valuation that focuses only on individual values evades the substantial collective and intersubjective meanings, significance and value from ecosystems. Shared, plural and cultural values of ecosystems constitute a diffuse and interdisciplinary field of research, covering an area that links questions around value ontology, elicitation and aggregation with questions of participation, ethics, and social justice. Synthesising understanding from various contributions to this Special Issue of Ecosystem Services, and with a particular focus on deliberation and deliberative valuation, we discuss key findings and present 35 future research questions in eight topic areas: 1) the ontology of shared values; 2) the role of catalyst and conflict points; 3) shared values and cultural ecosystem services; 4) transcendental values; 5) the process and outcomes of deliberation; 6) deliberative monetary valuation; 7) value aggregation, meta-values and ‘rules of the game’; and 8) integrating valuation methods. The results of this Special Issue and these key questions can help develop a more extensive evidence base to mature the area and develop environmental valuation into a more pluralistic, comprehensive, robust, legitimate and effective way of safeguarding ecosystems and their services for the future

Work Package Report 6: Shared, plural and cultural values of ecosystems – Summary

Key findings: Finding 1: Shared values resulting from deliberative, group-based valuation are different from individual values. Case study evidence suggests that they are more informed, considered, confident and reflective of participants’ deeper-held, transcendental values. Deliberated, group-based monetary values may be a better reflection of real welfare impacts than non-deliberated individual values, if derived through a carefully designed and managed process. Although more research is needed to expand the currently small evidence base on deliberative monetary methods, group deliberation has the potential to significantly enhance elicitation of values. Finding 2: The ethical, moral and justice dimensions of many environmental issues necessitate approaches that allow for the elicitation of shared and plural values. Key ethical concerns include: 1) providing a space and opportunity for people to identify values that they may find difficult to articulate (e.g. spiritual, identity); 2) recognising that some values cannot be traded without discussion and negotiation (e.g. the legal or felt rights of local people, intrinsic values of other species); and 3) understanding that it is often difficult to isolate valuation from decision-making processes because people feel there are strong ethical or moral issues at stake that need to be debated (e.g. the justice of the process, fairness in the distribution of benefits or disbenefits, responsibility, and issues of sustainability and future generations). Finding 3: Catalyst and/or conflict points can play a key role in the emergence and articulation of values at a societal or community level that have not previously been outwardly or explicitly articulated. Catalyst and conflict points can be symbolic and are often linked to wider contested issues and meanings about who is involved in decision-making, whose voice counts and who receives the benefits or disbenefits of environmental change. These catalyst points can potentially be connected to feelings of powerlessness that give rise to concern and protest. By recognising transcendental societal and communal values (the deeper-held and overarching values held by society and communities), it becomes possible to make these values explicit and incorporate them in decision-making to better anticipate and manage conflicts. Finding 4: There is a diversity of ways in which shared, plural, cultural and social values are used, but they are rarely conceptualised. The UK NEAFO provides a clear theoretical framework that distinguishes and categorises different dimensions and types of shared values. The proposed range of value types was both identifiable and distinguishable within case study results. This suggests that the framework provides a useful basis for operationalizing shared values for decision-making. Finding 5: Shared and social values in the sense of value to society is conceptualised very differently by conventional economics and other disciplines. Neoclassical economists have generally undertaken valuation by equating social value with the aggregate of individual values. They consider values as fundamentally commensurable. In contrast, literature from other disciplines consistently considers values as plural, not just in the sense that multiple things have value, but also that there are multiple dimensions to value that cannot necessarily be captured in a single metric. Within mainstream economics, the difficulties associated with commensurability and aggregating values have long been recognised, but have also been neglected. An interesting area for future debate between economic and non-economic views on values may be the normative nature of value-aggregation. Finding 6: A mixed method approach is required to elicit the multiple dimensions of shared values and to translate deeper-held, transcendental values into contextual values and preferences. Monetary valuation is limited to quantifying values. Other methods are needed to understand their meaning or content, and the communal, societal and transcendental values that underpin them. Psychometric, non-analytical and interpretive methods (e.g. storytelling) can reveal those shared values. They can be combined with deliberative-analytical methods (e.g. deliberative monetary valuation and multi-criteria analysis) to provide a comprehensive valuation that can quantify values, understand their individual and shared meanings and significance, and better include ethical dimensions. Finding 7: Deliberative and social learning processes help people to understand the values held by others; they can lead to increased sharing of values and/or to greater acceptance of the decisions emerging from such processes. Deliberation clearly affects what values participants express compared to non-deliberated processes. There is also a growing body of theoretical and empirical research suggesting that deliberation has the potential to affect how people understand and shape the values of others. Although rarely considered in the economic literature, the concept of social learning helps to explain some of the processes involved in deliberation. The extent to which deliberation or social learning helps participants express and shape values will depend upon the frequency and depth of interactions and the timescale over which interactions occur. Only a shift in cultural values (e.g. less emphasis on material wealth), reflected in other societal institutions (e.g. changes in the indicators used to measure national progress) is likely to achieve sustainable outcomes in the long-term. Finding 8: Media analysis is a promising avenue for characterising different types of shared values at a large scale, as well as assessing the conflicts between the communal values of different sectors of society. There has been a marked increase in public interest in environmental issues over the last decade, which is reflected in their increased media coverage. Media content and discourse analysis is able to distinguish and characterise the plurality of cultural, societal and transcendental values and their interrelationships, and can offer a picture of the self- and other-regarding values that underpin environmental issues and conflicts. Social media can provide a further forum for understanding societal and communal values surrounding environmental issues. Finding 9: Aesthetic and spiritual values of ecosystems have a strong non-instrumental component. While they benefit human well-being, they should not simply be classified as just ‘services’ or ‘benefits’. Many spiritual discourses about nature resist talk of consequentialist benefits and economic analysis. These discourses counter assertions of the disenchantment of the world, which is associated with an instrumental environmental ethic and the commodification of nature. Allowing the possibility of enchantment can be a richer way of understanding our experience of nature and alerts us to the limitations of using economic models for valuation and informing decisions about these profound cultural ecosystem ‘services’. Faith communities have experience of using these non-utilitarian values in their own decision-making and provide models that could be adapted for use in environmental decision-making. Finding 10: Subjective well-being measures provide a useful means of assessing ‘intangible’ cultural ecosystem services and their benefits. Different user groups associate common elements of subjective well-being with environmental settings, providing opportunities for development of standardised measures. In the UK NEAFO, key facets of well-being associated with places in nature across different user groups included: engagement with nature (incorporating elements of connectedness, getting to know nature and the beauty of nature, and taking care of a place); therapeutic benefits (including physical and mental aspects of health); place identity (including a sense of place and belonging); spiritual value (in the sense of feeling connected or responsible to something larger than oneself); social bonding with others; and transformative and memorable experiences. Further empirical work with different user groups and environmental settings would allow for the continued development of a standardised tool for large-scale non-monetary assessment of cultural ecosystem services

Making space for cultural ecosystem services: insights from a study of the UK Nature Improvement Initiative

A study of the cultural ecosystem services (CES) arising from peoples’ interactions with the rural environment is conducted within the context of a landscape scale, ‘nature improvement’ initiative in the United Kingdom. Taking a mixed methodological approach, the research applies, and demonstrates empirically, a framework for CES developed under the UK National Ecosystem Assessment (Fish et al., 2016). Applications of the framework involve the study of the ‘environmental spaces’ and ‘cultural practices’ that contribute to the realisation of benefits to well-being. In this paper empirical work is undertaken to inform the CES evidence base informing management priorities of the Northern Devon Nature Improvement Area (NDNIA) in south west England. Findings from a questionnaire survey, qualitative mapping, group discussion and a participatory arts-based research process are presented to document the many and diverse ways this study area matters to local communities. The paper analyses the qualities that research participants attribute to the environmental space of the NDNIA, the cultural practices conducted and enabled within it, and their associated benefits. The implications of the study for applying this framework through mixed methodological research are discussed, alongside an account of the impact of this approach within the NDNIA itself.This research was funded through the UK National Ecosystem Assessment Follow-On (Work Package 5: Cultural ecosystem services and indicators) funded by the UK Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the Welsh Government, the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), and Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)