How integrating 'socio-cultural values' into ecosystem services evaluations can give meaning to value indicators

Abstract

As an attempt to clarify the meaning of ‘values’ within ecosystem services (ES) assessments, this paper proposes the integration and fine-tuning of the concept of ‘socio-cultural values’ within the ES assessment framework. Firstly, it makes a conceptual clarification between biophysical, social or monetary value indicators describing the performance of a service, and socio-cultural values reflecting opinions on the importance of a (set of) service(s). Secondly, it provides a practical application to illustrate how to interpret ‘social value indicators’ through their interactions with ‘socio-cultural values’. An adequate use of these ‘socio-cultural values’ combined with subjective social value indicators’ makes it possible to take the opinion of a wide range of actors into account and to give meaning to their expressed preferences instead of blindfolding on caricaturized profiles. The case study in this paper deals with the Ardennes forests (Belgium). Wider public preferences for different structural forest characteristics (as performance-oriented ES value indicators) actually relate to different ‘socio-cultural values’. The study results reveal a mismatch between current forest management strategies and wider public preferences. This paper clearly demonstrates the potential of ‘socio-cultural values’ to improve legitimacy and to foster consensus-building of decision-making in natural resource management.