Research on the inclusion of the relational values of nature in nature assessments
As part of the GLOBIO team, Imani Taroenodikromo recently finished her MSc thesis research on the inclusion of relational values in assessments of biodiversity and ecosystem services. In this post, she shares some insights from her research.
“During my time at PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, I had the opportunity to get to know the GLOBIO team and learn more about their work, particularly the work on assessing the value(s) of nature. In my thesis I focused on the relational values of nature (RV), a rather new concept that strongly relates to personal and collective human-nature relationships with nature. Various researchers advocate for the attention to and inclusion of RV in policy and decision-making to realize future sustainable societies. Hence it is relevant to study how actors on the science-policy interface view RV. PBL is a suitable case study due to their relation with both science and policy. Hence, my research focused on the following questions:
What do PBL researchers think of relational values of nature? Do they think it is relevant? How would they want to study this? And what is necessary to do so?
Although I have not directly worked with models, such as GLOBIO, I have learned a lot about their importance in PBL’s work about nature (e.g., assessments of biodiversity and ecosystem services). I learned that nature is often represented in numbers which is considered suitable to represent intrinsic (e.g., biodiversity indicators such as mean species abundance) and instrumental (e.g., ecosystem services indicators) values of nature.
Based on interviews with PBL researchers, I found that respondents perceive RV as difficult to quantify and to generalize because RV are very context-specific and built upon personal relationships. The difficulty came back when they were asked about how to include RV in their assessments, e.g. with quantitatively, qualitatively or a combination of the two. Nevertheless, respondents view RV as relevant for effective nature policymaking, and so also relevant for their own work. My research did not focus on finding what the best approach is to take, but rather to discuss that suitable research methods depend on the kind of questions you would like to answer. Respondents indicate that they would like to explore the concept of RV first, to expand their knowledge. Because RV are inherently more of qualitative nature, it is logical to start with such an approach and not quantify the concept immediately. This is most important to prevent any kind of misunderstanding of what RV really are.
At some point, RV will perhaps be included in quantitative research, e.g. in models and scenarios. However, including RV only in models and scenarios will not be the ultimate solution when it comes to embracing the plural values of nature in policymaking. Rather it is a call for interdisciplinary approaches where social sciences and natural sciences come together and experiment the ways in which RV can be included in assessments that support policy. Because there is no one way to include RV yet, this step where researchers explore ways to operationalize RV is crucial besides a good foundation on the conceptual understanding of RV. Ultimately, it is important to be transparent about the limitations of your work and an have an open attitude to other research methods so that complex questions about both the biophysical part and the social part of the environment can be answered. This way we are better able to include different perspectives on nature and we can find better ways of valuing nature.”
