Talking about what matters: Eliciting cultural service values from communities

Background/Question/Methods

The demand for better representation of cultural considerations in environmental management is increasingly evident. As two cases in point, ecosystem service approaches consider cultural services a major class of ecosystem services, while conservation and spatial planners recognize indigenous constituents and the cultural knowledge they hold as key to good management. Accordingly, collaborations between anthropologists, planners, decision makers and biodiversity experts about the subject of culture are increasingly common—but also commonly fraught. Those whose expertise is culture often engage in such collaborations because they reject the idea of measurement outright or worry that a practitioner from ‘elsewhere’ will employ a ‘measure of culture’ either poorly or naively conceived. Whereas, those from an economic or biophysical training must grapple with less tangible properties of culture as they intersect with economic, biological or other material measures.

Results/Conclusions

This paper means to assist those who engage in collaborations to characterize cultural phenomena relevant to decision-making fora in three ways; by (i) illustrating the likely mindset of would-be collaborators; (ii) providing examples of trialed approaches that might enable progress by attending to the needs of both sides; and (iii) characterizing the kinds of obstacles that are in principle solvable through such methodological innovation and those more likely to engender theoretical impasse. We accomplish these three tasks in part by examining three cases wherein culture was a critical variable in environmental decision making: New Zealand’s risk management associated with Maori concerns about genetically modified organisms; a study of cultural services to assist marine planning in coastal British Columbia; and a decision-making process including a local First Nation regarding dam-river flows in British Columbia. We examine how ‘culture’ came to be manifest in each case and describe ensuing methodological experimentation used to define and/or populate the meaning of cultural classifications, and/or develop locally appropriate scales or metrics to express cultural concerns in a manner consistent with theory from scholars of judgment and decision making. We conclude that the characterization of cultural phenomena is least amenable to methodological innovations when prevailing cultural worldviews contain elements fundamentally at odds with efforts to quantify benefits/impacts, but that even in such cases some improvements may be achievable if decision-makers are flexible regarding qualitative expressions and quantification through multiple metrics versus a sole commitment to dollar metrics.