Valuing nature: Multiple identities and plurality of values

Background/Question/Methods The way we behave or do things is to a large extent influenced by our value systems. Our value systems are in turn guided or influenced by a range of factors that include gender, culture, knowledge, education, religion, and ecological conditions among others. Over the past 20 years, there have been a profusion of studies on the valuation of natural systems. The most common and now widely accepted notion of values when addressing the natural system is monetary economic value, with direct and indirect values playing a key role in the end results. Two problems arise form this trend of assigning a monetary value on our natural system: (i) assuming that all individuals behave as a market agents with a sole identity of a self-maximizing entity; (ii) reducing the plurality of values individuals have on natural systems to a single metric, such as monetary value as currently happens. Sociologists, physiologists and many enlightened economists have shown without doubt that individual behavior is influenced by the multiple identities they might have and this multiplicity is then articulated and expressed as a plurality of values. Individuals are in constant internal conflict emerging from the tensions between self-maximization of individual utility versus the welfare of others and society at large. This becomes especially astute when it comes to the use and conservation of nature. The question I want to pose today is do we have a consistent and coherent understanding of human behavior and the reasons why humanity at large has been on a path of degrading the natural systems around the world. Why do we destroy the very systems, which are critical for our survival? Results/Conclusions This paper postulates that the present valuation studies misrepresent the individual as a single self-maximizing identity that values natural systems purely as a monetary economic good. Therefore, the methodologies used to solicit these values already begin with false assumptions. In other words, the present valuation approaches and methodologies might have specification and measurement errors misleading results and policy responses thus perpetuating the decline in our natural systems. New approaches are needed and this paper will present some developments in the human dimension literature and therefore shed some new innovative insights that might force us to radically question the present initiatives as the appropriate way forward.