What are we protecting? Rethinking relational values and nature(s)

ABSTRACT

Relational values have been proposed as a way of capturing more inclusively the relationships that people have with nature and have been adopted within the conceptual framework of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). Relational values literature has taken strides towards a more comprehensive appreciation of human-nature interactions than previous frameworks. However, we see an opportunity to build further on the relational values concept through the frame of political ontology. In this Perspective, we argue that, in order to understand people’s relationships with their environments, we must first ask the following question: what is nature to those who value their relationships with it? Comprehending the multiple natures that people experience and value can help us to achieve equitable and representative conservation policy, explain actions and behaviours, and identify obstacles to engagement with conservation agendas.

Key policy highlights

• Relational values currently embrace a plurality of values but not plural natures or worlds

• Political ontology can build on relational values

• To ensure equitable representation in conservation policy and outcomes, it is necessary to recognize and account for ontological difference

• Excluding underlying ontology may obfuscate potential conservation sticking points.

EDITED BY:

• Amrita Neelakantan

KEYWORDS:

• Relational values
• political ontology
• nature
• IPBES
• environmental conservation
• conservation policy
• Indigenous and local knowledge
• spiritual values

Introduction

Relational values have emerged as a conceptual ‘middle ground’ in the negotiation between instrumental and intrinsic values, a pervasive polarity which has characterised much conservation literature (Chan et al. 2016, 2018). The relational values concept has been enthusiastically taken up in academic work,¹ perhaps most prominently in the conceptual framework adopted by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) (Díaz et al. 2015).

Relational values can be defined as ‘preferences, principles, and virtues associated with relationships’ (Chan et al. 2016, p.462) between humans and nature. In essence, relational values describe the ways in which humans value their relationship(s) with nature, as distinct from the tangible material benefits which may be derived from its utilization (food, energy, and so on). Relational values describe the value humans attribute to (non-use) interactions with their environment, namely ‘the values that are imbedded in desirable (sought after) relationships, including those among people and between people and nature’ (Díaz et al. 2015, p.4). Relational values capture a wide range of value-sets, including certain kinship values (Himes and Muraca 2018), stewardship values (Chan et al. 2016), Indigenous values (Sheremata 2018; Gould et al. 2019), and spiritual values (Pascual et al. 2017; Knippenberg et al. 2018; Muradian and Pascual 2018; Lliso et al. 2022). More particularly, relational values include ‘taking care of one’s cultural and historical heritage’ (Schröter et al. 2020, p. 51), ‘honouring the Earth as a sacred living being’ (Pascual et al. 2017, p. 8), Indigenous and local knowledge and other world-views on human-nature relationships (Pascual et al. 2017, pp. 8–9). On these bases, relational values advance particular visions of why nature (or certain aspects of it) should be protected or conserved.

However, notwithstanding the capacity of relational values to extend beyond the instrumental/intrinsic values debate, and its promise to ‘open the door to new, potentially more productive policy approaches’ (Chan et al. 2016, p.462), there is, we argue, an underexplored gap within the concept, as currently defined. Relational values currently do not account for the ontological differences which form the substrate of peoples’ relationships with and experiences of nature. Relational values do not yet appreciate the distinction between different values which agree on a single, common nature, and different values which are premised on different natures. As an example, an instrumental value holder and a relational-stewardship values holder may disagree over the construction of a dam on a wild river; however, while one values the river for its potential to generate energy and the other believes that conserving the river is the ‘right’ thing to do (see Chan et al. 2016), and that the dam would not be consistent with reasonable and wise use of the river (West et al. 2018; Mattijssen et al. 2020), they still agree on the subject of their disagreement: a river. In a different scenario, an instrumental values holder may wish to clear a forest to obtain timber, but a relational-spiritual values holder, a member of a particular religious order, may want to protect a god, who happens to be the same place; while a values conflict exists here, there is no agreement on what or who the values relate to: a forest or a god. While the relational values concept explains the differences between instrumental and relational values in each scenario, it struggles to comprehend the gravity of the distinction between the nature(s) experienced by the relational-stewardship values holder and the relational-spiritual values holder.

The capacity of the relational values concept to consider a plurality of values (Himes and Muraca 2018; Stålhammar and Thorén 2019) and plural meanings of nature (Mattijssen et al. 2020) has been brought into discussion within recent literature. According to Himes and Muraca (2018), a pluralistic approach ‘captures the variety of ways people express why they value what they call nature’ (p. 2, emphasis added). Our paper furthers this discussion by concerning itself with the ‘what’. Our contribution provides a pathway for further engaging with this question through the adoption of political ontology as a frame of analysis.

In order to give genuine consideration to the ‘preferences, principles and virtues’ (Chan et al. 2016, p.462) held by all affected groups in conservation policy, an appreciation of the gravity of the distinction between the scientific world and the various other ‘worlds’ which people and groups enact and inhabit is necessary. In this Perspective, we seek to provide a basis for appreciating ontological difference in peoples’ relationships with nature(s). This is consistent with the aims of the relational values concept, which has arisen from ‘two motivations – interdisciplinary inclusion and real-world application’ (Chan et al. 2018, p. A1). We are likewise motivated by both.

To do this, we first outline the current place of relational values in conservation literature with reference to the IPBES conceptual framework. We then explore political ontology and its reframing of values through consideration of the realities which human groups inhabit (see Blaser 2009). Finally, we draw conclusions regarding the need to simultaneously consider epistemology and ontology within the relational values concept.

Relational values and the IPBES conceptual framework

IPBES, concerned with ‘nature’s contributions to people’ (Díaz et al. 2015; Pascual et al. 2017), represents a shift away from the instrumentalist language of the service provision paradigm advanced by earlier Ecosystem Services literature, although the extent of this shift is subject to some debate (see Kadykalo et al. 2019). Established in 2012, IPBES is an ‘enhanced science-policy interface for biodiversity and ecosystem services’ which supports international conservation policy making and implementation (IPBES, April 2012; UNEP,1 June 2010). Relational values have been adopted in the IPBES conceptual framework (Díaz et al. 2015).

The IPBES conceptual framework incorporates a broad and inclusive suite of environmental values, which it recognises are diverse and arise from different cultural contexts (Pascual et al. 2017, p. 7). Two broad umbrella categories of values address human-nature relationships: ‘nature’s contributions to people’, and ‘Good Quality of Life’. A third category, ‘Nature’, encapsulates scientific, Indigenous and other perspectives on our environment. Within these categories, IPBES recognises three types of values: anthropocentric instrumentalist values, anthropocentric relational values, and intrinsic values (Díaz et al. 2015). Relational values are considered anthropocentric to the extent that the conferral of value upon nature is tied to human understandings and relationships.

IPBES recognizes that groups of people have very different perspectives on the value of nature. It is, therefore, ‘built on a broad knowledge-base: inclusive of natural science, social sciences, and traditional and indigenous knowledge’ (IPBES, April 2012). The IPBES conceptual framework seeks to find common ground between ‘Western’, instrumentalist approaches (as previously emphasised in ES literature) and ‘other knowledge systems’, including Indigenous and local knowledge, thereby facilitating ‘crossdisciplinary and crosscultural understanding and interoperability’ (Díaz et al. 2015, p. 4). IPBES is influenced by two broad approaches to describing the human-nature relationship – ES and the concept of ‘Mother Earth’, which is situated in other knowledge systems and Indigenous and local knowledge (Borie and Hulme 2015). Through adoption of this pluralistic epistemic approach, the ‘IPBES conceptual framework recognizes both perspectives equally and legitimizes them’ (Borie and Hulme 2015, p. 494, emphasis added).

The IPBES conceptual framework understates the significance of other knowledge systems and indigenous and local knowledge by relegating them to the sphere of ‘perspectives’. In doing so, IPBES does not fully capture their importance and implications: many Indigenous, spiritual and other groups advance very different realities to the scientific world, and this has significant implications for the ways in which groups communicate and negotiate conservation policy and outcomes.

Relational values and ontologies

The goal of relational values is fundamentally connected to the drive to understand what relationships exist between human individuals, groups and societies with what has come to be termed nature. The concept of nature has its own long, sociocultural trajectory, and, from an anthropological standpoint, cannot be defined in one way. Although the notions of nature as separate from society or culture, or as the world beyond or separate from humanity, have been normalised and ‘naturalised’, they are not comprehensive representations of the world for all groups of people. In other words, we do not all understand nature in the same ways, and neither do we see ourselves in a particular relationship with it; rather, there are multiple, simultaneous and overlapping ways of understanding and inhabiting the world, and of understanding who inhabits it alongside us.

Within the IPBES conceptual framework, the focus on ‘values’, including relational values, is epistemic: that is, it is preoccupied with someone’s knowledge of and relationship with a predetermined entity (such as a forest or a river). While there is an appreciation that values may be multiple and overlapping – that is, that people may value an entity in different ways or for different reasons – the entity itself remains singular as far as the framework is concerned. It is always a forest, or a river, irrespective of whether groups, communities or individuals have different ontological assumptions underlying their interactions and values.

Relational values literature has begun to consider the question of ontology in various ways; however, the field lacks a unifying framework to understand ontology (see Muradian and Pascual 2018; Saxena et al. 2018; O’Connor and Kenter 2019; Stålhammar and Thorén 2019; Mattijssen et al. 2020; Kenter and O’Connor 2022). The approach which makes the most significant strides to acknowledging the ontological in relational values is the ‘Life Framework of Values’ proposed by O’Connor and Kenter (2019). In particular, their contribution of ‘how we live as the natural world’ opens opportunities for further exploration of relational and intrinsic values. This ontological position, humans-as-nature, has radical implications for relation values thinking. However, O’Connor and Kenter (2019) concern themselves predominantly with the contribution of ontology for the appreciation of intrinsic values. We suggest that the overarching discussion of relational values would benefit from consideration of the analytical framework of political ontology (Blaser 2009). Doing so opens up opportunities to uncover and better understand the potential contributions of various ontologies to environmental conservation, and to navigate their convergences and divergences in policy making. In other words, we might further ask ‘Which version [of nature] might be better to live with? Which is worse? How, and for whom?’ (Mol 2013, p. 381).

Political ontology

Political ontology was coined by anthropologist Mario Blaser (2009), and subsequently developed by Escobar (2016, 2017), Law (2015), De la Cadena (2010), and De la Cadena and Blaser (2018). The field grows out of political ecology, a critical interdisciplinary field within environmental studies which explores the co-constitution of nature and society (Benjaminsen and Svarstad 2019). It also draws on conceptual foundations in anthropology, including the work of Viveiros De Castro (2004). A broad definition of political ontology is provided by De la Cadena and Blaser (2018):

We use the term ‘political ontology’ to designate an imaginary for a politics of reality, and a field that stands where political economy and political ecology, formulated with ideas of nature and economic growth, are insufficient (at times even unable) to think antagonisms that, for example, involve things like mountains and forests that emerge as resources through some practices but also as persons through other practices. (p. 5)

Political ontology represents an approach which is at once critical and pragmatic. It is critical insofar as it seeks to detach from a ‘one-world world’ (Law 2015), and pragmatic in its recognition that many people already live in many different versions of reality, thus negating the empirical usefulness of a singular reality as a way to understand how people navigate the world/s they inhabit. As Blaser (2013) states, ‘ontology works with the contradictions between a set of initial assumptions and some body of material that appears to contradict it’ (p. 551).

In relation to the nature of the realities that we are discussing, we align with Blaser in casting ontology as a way of worlding or enacting some aspect of reality. Worlding comprehends both materiality and the meanings assigned to it; realities are dynamic and not fixed; and realities are in an iterative process of being created, being narrated and being lived out. Citing science and technology scholars (Law 2015; Mol 1999, among others), Blaser (2013) clarifies that his meta-ontological position here is underpinned by a material-semiotic foundation, positing two main points:) avoiding the assumption that reality is ‘out there’, and 2) that ‘reality is always in the making through the dynamic relations of hybrid assemblages’ (pp. 551–552). In other words, ontology is neither entirely within nor external to people; we are not neutral observers looking at the world from afar, but we are located within materiality. Matter exists alongside our understandings of it, and we need to grapple with both. This approach to ontologies bridges experiences of materiality with meaning, allowing us to grapple with multiple, shifting, and coexisting experiences and understandings.

Political ontology marks a deliberate step away from the ‘one-world world’ (see Law 2015), in which all accounts and practices are assessed against a single framework, or version of reality. The one-world world also manifests in universalising assumptions about what nature is across all people – for instance, asserting that nature is fundamentally X, and that people may hold more or less complete understandings of this single definition. Appreciating realities through the frame of political ontology involves engaging with social practices and stories in relation to how they make worlds for individuals and groups, not just relegating them to the sphere of ‘cultural’ perspectives. This means ‘taking seriously’ (Holbraad and Pedersen 2017) the stories which are told about phenomena, and suspending the inclination to apply one’s own frameworks or beliefs in an evaluative assessment of others’ accounts and practices. It also involves thinking critically about the application of frameworks to situations in which those frameworks might not apply. For instance, the ontologically motivated researcher may ask themselves on what basis we apply the frames we do: for instance, does X necessarily fit in this situation?

Ontology or epistemology?

Political ontology makes a deliberate break from the epistemic realm, challenging multiculturalism (one world, with many ways of being and thinking within it) and epistemic plurality (one world, with many ways of understanding it). This is a strategic break to avoid imposing an ultimate ontological standpoint against which all others are assessed – and against which many end up looking partial, problematic, ill-informed or even nonsensical. In other words, we are dealing with many worlds, many ways of being and thinking within those worlds, and many ways of understanding those worlds. This is part of the drive to understand ontologies for what they are, and to give them the full weight of realities rather than interpretations thereof. As Blaser (2014) argues, ontologies are not cultures or cultural viewpoints:

… the notion of ‘cultural difference’ is a function of the modernist ontological assumption that there is one reality or world out there and multiple perspectives or cultural representations of it. Thus, when we treat difference as cultural we are sneaking up and advancing a particular ontology, which does not do justice to the ontological difference that might be at stake. (p. 52)

Radical differences at play are acknowledged (Holbraad and Pedersen 2017; Viveiros; De Castro 2004), and there is no longer a need to accommodate cultural perspectives within a single ontological frame. As such, accounts or depictions of reality need no longer be cast as partial, incomplete, fanciful, and so on – rather, they ‘partake in the performance of that which they narrate’’ (Blaser 2013, p. 552). Furthermore, as Blaser (2013) clarifies:

Political ontology is intended neither as a pedagogic project to illuminate a reality that deficient theorizing cannot grasp, nor as a proselytizing project to show the virtues of other, nonmodern blueprints for a good life … Political ontology is closer to hard-nosed pragmatism than to liberal desire to understand everyone. (p. 559)

Ontological politics – ‘processes of asserting particular worlds or enacting realities’ (Yates et al. 2017, p. 800), including those which are presented as legitimate, unquestioned and unmarked – function at the juncture of power and agency (see also Mol 1999). To ensure equitable representation in conservation policy and outcomes, it is therefore necessary to both recognize and account for ontological difference. We previously explored this issue in an in-depth case study of the Ganges River (Campbell and Gurney 2020). To be clear, our intention is not to offer an uncritical endorsement of the practices associated with and generative of particular ontological positions – indeed, some may not be commensurate with conservation objectives. In such cases, it may be even more important to appreciate the gravity of the realities at play, insofar as they shape and influence humans’ actions and interactions with nature(s).

Our argument is pragmatic: peoples – individuals, societies, cultural groups, and so on – already hold multiple, overlapping, sometimes converging and sometimes conflicting ontologies of the realities they inhabit, including aspects thereof which we might term ‘nature’ or the natural world. Without acknowledging this, we end up holding a discussion about the importance of appreciating and protecting nature without truly grappling with what directly informs people’s interactions with, responses to and behaviours towards ‘nature’. Therefore, while we might say that an environmentalist group interacts with a forest in a particular way in order to promote conservation – such as protesting against deforestation – we could not say that their behaviours and understandings are equivalent to those of a religious group which interacts with the same forest on the basis of it being sacred or holy, even if they might engage in the same anti-deforestation protests. It seems that they are engaging in a similar behaviour. Both groups value their relationships with the forest, although they hold distinct relational values (the conservationist group may adopt stewardship values, while the religious group may adopt spiritual values). However, for these two groups, the forest is not the same. While their behaviours appear to overlap or align, we cannot comprehensively understand why this is the case if we look only to behaviours and values, and we do not have a reliable explanatory mechanism to account for situations in which the subject of those behaviours and values is not shared (i.e. a forest ecosystem or a god). Focusing only on behaviours and values may also obfuscate potential conservation sticking points: while stewardship values will often align well with conservation objectives in this context, the forest-as-god may inform behaviours which variously align with, or could be inconsistent with conservation objectives. On the flip side, conservation objectives as framed may not align well with the ontology of forest-as-god, underscoring the need to create a full map of the ontologies at play in order to understand how to effectively communicate conservation agendas for each context. Furthermore, if we wish to shape or influence behaviours in order to enhance ecological outcomes, then we need to understand how this may be possible, what kinds of practices and understandings we might encounter, and how to work with people and their realities – particularly those which may be misunderstood or little appreciated. For an illustrative example of ontological mapping, see the river Ganges as a case study (Campbell and Gurney 2020).

Critical evaluation and conclusion

In the face of critical threats to ecosystems across the world, it is imperative to understand and take account of justifications for conserving and protecting ecosystems. We see political ontology as a beneficial addition to this discussion. This is not an attempt to create difference where there is none, but to recognise and take account of difference that already exists and is not currently acknowledged within relational values. In this way, as Blaser (2013) states, political ontology embraces a certain ‘hard-nosed pragmatism’ (p. 559). Drawing on Yates et al. (2017), there is a need to identify divergent ontological positions which can come together to enhance ecological conservation (ontological conjunctures); likewise, there is a need to fully appreciate the implications of divergent ontologies which generate situations where there may be little common ground (ontological disjunctures).

How and whether these may be negotiated will be dependent on the particular realities at play. It will also depend upon a conceptual framework that is willing to acknowledge them in the first place and accommodate their negotiation. Relational values have the potential to do this, and we argue that their potential will be enhanced by a move beyond epistemic concerns in order to appreciate the full implications of the ‘preferences, principles, and virtues’ (Chan et al. 2016, p.462) of peoples’ experiences with nature(s).

Our aim in this Perspective is not to advance a teleological narrative concerning the nature of reality, or to make claims about what is ‘real’ or not, but rather to emphasize the distinction between epistemic and ontological practices and understandings among and between different groups of people. Ontological divides, as opposed to epistemic ones, have a profoundly more significant impact on the negotiation of governance solutions to conservation problems. Epistemic divides may be negotiated through a common language concerning reality; actors are able to appreciate diverging interests and perspectives and can make concessions and compromises. In contrast, ontological divides may present a zero-sum game where there is no shared ground, no comprehension of differing interests and little room for compromise. Recognizing ontological difference (instead of labelling it epistemic for the sake of expediency) enables identification at an early stage that the nature of negotiation must change.

According to Escobar (2017), political ontology is grounded within the ‘power-laden practices involved in bringing into being a particular world or ontology’ (p. 243); it also focuses on the inter-relations between worlds, ‘including the conflicts that ensue as different ontologies strive to sustain their own existence in their interaction with other worlds’ (p. 243). Equitable and inclusive recognition of ‘preferences, principles, and virtues associated with relationships’ (Chan et al. 2016, p.462) between humans and nature involves stepping away from hierarchizing the dominant one-world world over the different worlds advanced by groups operating outside modernity. Doing so has the capacity to enrich the RV concept to achieve more effective and representative conservation policy and outcomes.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See, for example, the special issue in Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, vol 35 (2018).