Elsevier

Ecosystem Services

Volume 44, August 2020, 101132
Ecosystem Services

Are relational values different in practice to instrumental values?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoser.2020.101132Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Relational and instrumental values are nearly indistinguishable in practice.

  • Importance of nature in fondest childhood memories linked to relational and instrumental values.

  • NEP statements related to relational and instrumental values.

  • Relational and instrumental values linked to extraversion and emotional stability.

  • Urgently need to expand empirical evidence base of relational values.

Abstract

Relational values have been proposed as a more inclusive alternative to instrumental and intrinsic values of nature. Although theoretically different, the empirical work to ascertain whether relational values are in practice different to instrumental values has been scarce. We surveyed 501 university students in Singapore to assess whether they could distinguish in practice between relational and instrumental values of several parks and to identify correlates of their value scores (their personality, the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) and their nature experiences). Using correlation and factor analysis, we find that relational and instrumental values are nearly indistinguishable in practice for our respondents. Correlates of high value scores are the importance of nature in fondest childhood memories and NEP statements related to concern with a future ecological crisis. Relational and instrumental values further shared multiple personality (extraversion, emotional stability) and NEP statement predictors. Our results call to urgently expand the empirical evidence base of relational values to inform their conceptualization.

Introduction

Valuation of nature has been based primarily on two main classes of values (Chan et al., 2016, Himes and Muraca, 2018). The first value class focuses on “instrumental values” which are the values of nature that are determined based on the services and benefits that nature can provide for human beings (Justus et al., 2009, Gómez-Baggethun et al., 2010). The second value class focuses on the values that nature has on its own, regardless of its use to humans. This is often referred to as “intrinsic value” (Lockwood 1999).

The dichotomy between the two values has been criticised to be constraining to people who may care for the environment differently and would take more action to protect the environment if environmental issues were framed in a different way (Chan et al. 2016). More importantly, the two values miss an essential component of decision-making by people. Decision-making often involves more than just considering the inherent worth of an entity (i.e. intrinsic value)— intrinsic value is also defined as the non-instrumental value of an object, i.e. the object has value on itself; value of an object by virtue of its intrinsic properties; and “objective value” of an object independent of the valuations of valuers (O’Neill 1992)—or the satisfaction brought by an entity (i.e. instrumental values), but also people’s relationship towards an entity and whether the relationship is important for achieving a meaningful life (Chan et al. 2016).

As a result, a third class of value has emerged in the value articulation for ecosystems. This third value class focuses on values associated with human-nature interactions as well as social interactions between humans which involve nature (Chan et al. 2016). These values are referred to as “relational values”. Unlike instrumental values, relational values are not directly present in an entity but are derived through people’s interaction, care and stewardship for the entity. Although here we use relational values in the sense of a third value category that breaks the dichotomy between instrumental and intrinsic values, other axiologies have been proposed demonstrating the complexity of the relational values concept. For instance, relational values have been described as not necessarily a values concept at the same level of instrumental values. They can also function as an epistemological framing or as a boundary object across disciplines (Stålhammar and Thorén 2019). For example, Muraca (2011) proposes an alternative axiological framework in which relational values reflect a spectrum of instrumental through to intrinsic values and, more specifically, intrinsic and relational values are two equipollent axes of a matrix.

The usefulness of relational values for ecosystem valuation is still an ongoing debate. While there have been critics about relational values being indistinct from the other two value classes (Maier and Feest, 2016, Piccolo, 2017), many studies have acknowledged that relational values present a distinct domain and can fill the gap left by the dichotomy between instrumental and intrinsic value (Gomez-Baggethun and Martin-Lopez, 2015, Jacobs et al., 2016, Arias-Arévalo et al., 2017, Klain et al., 2017, Pascual et al., 2017, Himes and Muraca, 2018). The inclusion of relational values in the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) conceptual framework has helped make them rapidly popular (Pascual et al. 2017). A special issue in the journal Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability has further consolidated and expanded the definition, contextualization and application of relational values (Chan et al. 2018). In this special issue, the need to develop more empirical analyses to test the empirical evidence base of relational values has been called for (Schulz and Martin-Ortega 2018). There have also been reports of the existence of relational values in the career decisions of conservationists (Knippenberg et al. 2018), links between relational values and place-based relational landscapes literature have been made (Stenseke 2018), between relational values and protected areas (De Vos et al. 2018) and their prevalence in payment for watershed ecosystem services schemes (Bremer et al. 2018).

Despite all these advances, the operationalization of relational values and their comparison with other types of values has rarely been analyzed using quantitative empirical methods (barring Arias-Arévalo et al., 2017, Klain et al., 2017). In addition, to help characterise each value, the underlying factors which correlated with each value class would ideally be explored. Few studies have however investigated the underlying factors that may affect people’s values for ecosystems (an exception is van den Born et al. 2018). There are also existing theories such as the value belief norm theory (Stern et al. 1995) and the extinction of experience theory (Soga and Gaston 2016) which have linked ecological worldview and exposure to nature to values for nature.

In light of the uncertainties surrounding the practical interpretation of relational values compared to instrumental values, here we: (i) use correlational and factor analyses to ascertain the overlap between instrumental and relational values; and (ii) identify the factors that correlate with relational and instrumental values.

Section snippets

Case study: Values of ecosystems in Singapore

Singapore presents a unique case for the study of pluralistic valuation in the Asian context. Most of Singapore’s primary forests were lost by the end of 1920 (Corlett 1992). Inland forests were replaced by gambier and rubber plantations and subsequently by urban and industrial areas. Coastal forests were initially cleared for the cultivation of coconut, but with the increase in population, many coconut plantations were also lost as a result of land reclamation for more land and the creation of

Correlation and exploratory factor analysis between value statements

The three classes of values presented large positive correlations ranging from 0.54 to 0.74 once statements’ scores were average by value class. The strongest correlation was between relational and instrumental values (0.75 between relational and instrumental, 0.66 between instrumental and intrinsic and 0.55 between relational and intrinsic, Fig. 2, top left corner). It should be noted that only one statement for intrinsic values was used and the results pertaining to intrinsic values should be

Discussion

We found a high correlation between instrumental and relational values and that they could be loaded in the same factor with a very high Cronbach alpha (>0.9). This indicates not only that the statements for relational and instrumental values are internally valid, but that they are essentially measuring similar things and are largely redundant (Tavakol and Dennick 2011). These results suggest that, in practice, relational and instrumental values are quite similar to one another from the point

Conclusions

Relational and instrumental values were found to correlate highly and load into a unique factor under factor analysis, suggesting that they are nearly indistinguishable in practice. We found that factors such as personality, the NEP and childhood memories contributed to explain high scores in instrumental and relational values. Our results highlight the importance of psychological and personality factors research on the prediction of individuals’ relationship with nature. Our results also call

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This research is supported by the National Research Foundation of Singapore, Prime Minister’s Office, Singapore. The grant is under the Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE) Programme. The grant number is NRF2016-ITC001-013.

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