Editorial overview: Relational values: what are they, and what’s the fuss about?

Abstract

Relational values-as preferences, principles and virtues about human-nature relationships-have attracted a great deal of attention in recent years. The term has been used to include concepts and knowledge from a wide range of social sciences and humanities, e.g., importantly making space for qualitative approaches often neglected within environmental management and science. Meanwhile, crucial questions have emerged. What counts as a relational value, and what does not? How do relational values (RVs) compare with other value categories and terms, including held, assigned, instrumental, moral, shared, social, and non-material values (e.g., associated with cultural ecosystem services)? In this article, we address these issues, partly by providing context about how the RV term originated and how it has evolved to date. Most importantly, because of their somewhat unique combination of groundedness and moral relevance, positive relational values may offer important opportunities for the evolution of values that may be necessary for transformative change towards sustainability. The special issue includes contributions that contemplate particular concepts (e.g., care, stewardship, eudaimonia-human flourishing), applications (e.g., environmental assessment, environmental policy design), and the history of relevant scholarship in various intellectual traditions (e.g., ecological economics, human ecology, environmental education). Together with this suite of thought-provoking papers, we hope that the clarification we provide here facilitates a broad and productive interdisciplinary exchange to create and refine a reflective but powerful tool for sustainability and justice.

Three perspectives on relational values of nature

“…For example, while most accounts align with Chan et al (2016) who refer to social conditions and perceptions, Arias-Arévalo et al (2017, 2018 describe how RV also includes ecological conditions ensuring the preservation of life on earth. Chan et al (2018) describe how the development of the concept has been mainly motivated by interdisciplinary inclusion and real-world application and is argued to better capture how people actually think of and value nature (Chan et al 2016).…”

“…The most detailed philosophical treatment of RVs is due to Muraca (2011) and Himes and Muraca (2018) whose work has been a strong influence on proponents of the concepts (Chan et al 2016;Díaz et al 2015;Chan et al 2018). Muraca departs, to an extent, from the conventional intrinsic/instrumental distinction and contrasts intrinsic values (thought of as Kantian as-ends-in-themselves) with relational and instrumental values.…”

“…In a recent special issue devoted to RV , Chan et al (2018) explained the development of the concept as a strategic aspiration of bridging ideas across fields to affect the discourse on values in science-policy organizations, as well as relying on a tactical opportunity tied to the word 'values' in the IPBES conceptual framework. As the authors note, however, this use of RV as a value category raises familiar conceptual concerns, and they state that "there is a real danger that an ambiguous term is popular because everyone sees what they want in it, but there is no common ground for collective action or insight."…”

“…The objective is to critically examine, where and how the concept can contribute to our understanding of values within different disciplinary contexts. Starting from the perspective of RV as advocated by Chan et al (2016Chan et al ( , 2018 we delineate what 'job' the concept is described to do through comparing it to existing value concepts in three fields that deal with environmental values and value concepts in different ways: environmental ethics, ecosystem services valuation, and environmental psychology. We use three guiding questions to frame our analysis of each field: How are value concepts defined in the field?…”

Assessing the utility of conserving evolutionary history

“…We suggest that more work be directed at linking evolutionary history with a wider range of values (see e.g. Chan, Gould & Pascual, 2018)…”