With climate change, coastal areas are faced with unprecedented sea level rise and flooding, raising questions as to how societies will choose to adapt. One option is to strengthen existing sea walls to maintain current land uses; however, scientists, policy-makers and conservationists increasingly see the benefits of managed realignment, which is a nature-based coastal adaptation that involves the conversion of reclaimed farmland back to wetlands, allowing periodic local flooding in designated areas to reduce the risk of flooding downstream. We interviewed sixteen local organisations, landowners and farmers, and held workshops with 109 citizens living the Inner Forth estuary in eastern Scotland, to examine how managed realignment is supported by stakeholder attitudes and their engagement. Most of the farmers we interviewed prefer strengthened sea walls, to maintain their livelihoods and agricultural heritage. Citizens and local organisations were mainly supportive of managed realignment, because it provided wildlife and flood regulation benefits. However, we identified several barriers that could present obstacles to implementing managed realignment, for example, uncertainty whether it would support their principles of economic and rational decision-making. Our findings suggest that the local capacity to cope with rising sea levels is limited by lack of engagement with all relevant stakeholder groups, the limited scope of existing stakeholder partnerships, and poor short-term funding prospects of landscape partnerships that would facilitate collaboration and discussion. We suggest that including citizens, landowners, farmers and industries would strengthen existing stakeholder deliberation and collaboration, and support the Inner Forth's transition towards a more sustainable future shoreline.

Sociocultural valuation (SCV) of ecosystem services (ES) discloses the principles, importance or preferences expressed by people towards nature. Although ES research has increasingly addressed sociocultural values in past years, little effort has been made to systematically review the components of sociocultural valuation applications for different decision contexts (i.e. awareness raising, accounting, priority setting, litigation and instrument design). In this analysis, we investigate the characteristics of 48 different sociocultural valuation applications-characterised by unique combinations of decision context, methods, data collection formats and participants-across ten European case studies. Our findings show that raising awareness for the sociocultural value of ES by capturing people's perspective and establishing the status quo, was found the most frequent decision context in case studies, followed by priority setting and instrument development. Accounting and litigation issues were not addressed in any of the applications. We reveal that applications for particular decision contexts are methodologically similar, and that decision contexts determine the choice of methods, data collection formats and participants involved. Therefore, we conclude that understanding the decision context is a critical first step to designing and carrying out fit-for-purpose sociocultural valuation of ES in operational ecosystem management.

Managed realignment of shorelines to manage floods and restore wetland can be difficult to implement without the support and involvement of local communities. Ecosystem service valuation tools, such as choice experiments, can be used to engage citizens in planning these sustainable transitions, yet citizens need to know their local shoreline and the pressures it is facing. Otherwise, people's ability to participate in local governance and to value potential changes is limited. The aim of this study is to identify and address awareness gaps that would hinder informed participation in a choice experiment: we address awareness gaps through deliberative interventions in a workshop setting, and by measuring the impact of deliberation through a comparison of choice experiment results performed before and after each stage of deliberation with citizens living on the shores of the Inner Forth estuary in Scotland. We estimate separate choice models for each of the choice experiments and find that deliberation increases both the resistance to 'status quo' and support for landscape-scale managed realignment of the shoreline. The deliberative interventions helped to identify clearer shoreline priorities and reduce contradictory patterns in shoreline preference. After gaining experience and deliberation, we find participants to become more selective: willingness to pay decreases substantially and model performance improves (slightly). Preferences diverge after learning about shoreline issues, whereas discussion converges preferences for the two most important shoreline attributes. These findings suggest that deliberative valuation not only shapes citizens' attitudes towards shoreline management but also improves the quality of citizen engagement in the delivery of sustainable transitions.