Caught Between Personal and Collective Values: Biodiversity conservation in European decision‐making
Individual decision‐makers at different governance levels operate in social contexts, which means that they sometimes need to compromise their personal values. This dissonance is rarely the direct target of empirical analyses of environmental decision‐making. A recent paper by ESP researchers reports a Q‐analysis of decision‐makers’ personal perspectives and the perspectives they perceive to dominate in their decision‐making contexts. The analysis of interviews with 43 biodiversity conservation decision‐makers from nine European countries reveals one major conflict between personally held and perceived dominant perspectives: those decision‐makers who personally associate with intrinsic values and perceive utilitarian values to dominate in decision‐making experience dissonance. Personally held human benefit values are accommodated well in decision‐making contexts and decision‐makers who perceive insurance values to dominate experience the least conflict with personally held values.
Primmer, E., Termansen, M., Bredin, Y.K., Blicharska, M., Garcia-Llorente, M., Berry, P., Jääskeläinen, T., Bela, G., Fabók, V., Geamana, N., Harrison, P.A., Haslett, J., Cosor, G., Holst Andersen, A. 2017. Caught between personal and collective values: biodiversity conservation in European decision-making. Environmental Policy and Governance 27(6), 588–604.
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