Editorial: Shared, plural and cultural values

To deeply resolve conflicts between nature conservation and exploitation, we need valuations that result from, and are integrated with, transformative processes that bring together different voices to develop shared understandings of conflicts between ecosystem services and shared values around how to address them. This Special Issue builds on evidence from the second phase of the UK National Ecosystem Assessment to develop a discourse of shared, plural and cultural values in relation to ecosystems. Key themes include the formation and institutionalisation of shared values through socialisation, formal and informal deliberation; deliberative alternatives for aggregating values; understandings and critiques of deliberation; and interrelations between values, place and identity. The importance of institutional factors, such as power issues, and the inevitable subjectivity of valuations around complex and contested issues are highlighted. A wide range of monetary and non-monetary analytical, deliberative, interpretive and psychometric methods are integrated. Shared, plural and cultural values are presented as a knowledge intervention critiqueing the increasing tendency to artificially separate economic and socio-cultural values, monetary and non-monetary valuation and cultural and other ecosystem services. Deliberative valuations are advocated as a means to integrate plural values and as a boundary object between research, practitioner and policy communities, enabling more effective translation of values into decisions and creating new democratic spaces for transformative social change.