Increasing the credibility and salience of valuation through deliberation: Lessons from the Global South

Abstract

Valuation can be used for a wide range of purposes, including informing environmental decision-making, designing and evaluating policies, and acknowledging and raising awareness of the importance of the environment. A promising development in the field of environmental valuation that is receiving increasing attention is the hybridization of stated preference methods and deliberative approaches. Proponents claim that deliberative monetary valuation (DMV) can successfully address many of the limitations ascribed to more conventional monetary valuation approaches. However, DMV has scarcely been tested in contexts of the Global South thus far, where arguably, the benefits it offers may be most relevant. In this paper we study the applicability DMV on preference elicitation in a rural Indigenous community in Colombia. We find that DMV is superior to conventional stated preference approaches in terms of its capacity to elicit more considered, informed, and diverse values. Our results suggest that DMV offers learning opportunities for participants, the benefits of which are greater for those for whom conventional valuation exercises may seem too cognitively complex. We find that by the end of the deliberative workshop, participants were considering a wider range of preferences. We control for one of the main risks of DMV, which is the possibility of participants with a higher social status exercising a dominant role during the deliberative process, and do not find evidence of this being the case. Our results suggest that one of the main advantages of DMV is its capacity to capture a much broader set of values than conventional valuation approaches, including instrumental, relational and intrinsic values.