Naming the unnamed: relational values as knowledge and power

INTRODUCTION

In 2016 an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) explained a way of attributing value to nature beyond traditional notions of instrumental and intrinsic valuations (Chan et al. 2016). This PNAS article built on the concept of relational values, first named and elucidated by Muraca (2011), and developed further in the 2015 Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) conceptual framework (Díaz et al. 2015). The PNAS article, which included Muraca and most of the 2015 IPBES conceptual framework authors, promoted the concept of relational values to help with naming the plurality of values with no unifying name tied to people’s relationships with nature. As the authors pointed out, these values existed within culture and individual experience, but were at that moment absent from the dominant typology of value articulations. In time, empirical research analytically employed the concept of relational values to help name the specific relational values that are relevant to certain individuals and communities (e.g., Arias-Arévalo et al. 2017, Chapman et al. 2019, Mould et al. 2020, Chapman and Deplazes-Zemp 2022). This process of double naming (the overarching concept of relational values as the first naming, the specific relational-values categories in a region/community as the second naming), has yielded substantial new knowledge regarding human-nature relationships, which in turn has led to debates about how to better manage the complexity of social-ecological systems. As such, this new knowledge, derived from the double-naming processes inherent in the concept of relational values, exerts growing power over environmental decision making within society (Staddon 2021, IPBES 2022, Luque-Lora 2023). To be clear, this double-naming phenomenon related to relational values is not unique, but is a more generalized phenomenon associated with the development of any idea, e.g., naming sustainability as a concept and then naming what makes something sustainable. That said, it is important to understand that the naming of relational values is what gives power to the knowledge generated through this concept, or any concept: naming a practice sustainable is an articulation of knowledge, which in turn gives that practice power. Understanding this new power, stemming from this new knowledge facilitated by the concept of relational values, is the goal of this paper.

One formulation of how power can be conceived is the Foucauldian theory positing that whatever produces knowledge exerts power, and vice versa (Foucault 1980). In this paper I will show that the concept of relational values has spurred a copious amount of knowledge, mainly in the form of academic scholarship, in a relatively short amount of time. According to Foucault’s theory, that knowledge is thus exerting power in society, or the nearly infinite associations that make up the social. To better discuss and conceive of this power/knowledge dynamic regarding the concept of relational values, the naming process is once again utilized. I propose the term “relational-values apparatus” for the assemblage of heterogeneous entities and associations that produce knowledge regarding human-nature relationships utilizing the concept of relational values. By naming and explaining this power-exerting apparatus, the concept of relational values becomes more transparent and useful as a tool for managing complex social-ecological systems.

There is a philosophical debate about the nature of value: is it real, mind-independent, and discovered, i.e., objective, or is it mind-dependent and projected, i.e., subjective (Rolston 1982)? There is also a middle, dispositional account of value that posits that values are what humans are typically disposed to value (Smith et al. 1989). In this paper I will be pragmatic and sidestep this debate. I will only be concerned with the language used to articulate the values that people hold, and will be agnostic as to the true metaphysical account of value.

The remainder of this paper will describe in more detail the short but important historical trajectory of the concept of relational values, how the Foucauldian theory of power can help explain relational values’ rapid ascent in relevance, and how the relational-values apparatus is useful for disseminating information regarding human-nature relationships in ways that promote recognitional justice and resiliency in social-ecological systems.

THE HISTORY OF RELATIONAL VALUES

Relational values are a way of representing the many ways that people value their relationships with nature. For the sake of simplicity, “nature” in this paper refers to the non-human world, including non-human animals, species of animals, ecosystems, or places and landscapes. The concept of relational values, first named and elucidated by Muraca (2011), was featured in the 2015 conceptual framework from the IPBES as a third useful category of how people value nature, in addition to instrumental value and intrinsic value (Díaz et al. 2015). Then, in 2016, a widely read PNAS article brought the concept to further prominence (Chan et al. 2016). As a note, some scholars (Chan et al. 2018, Gould et al. 2023) have suggested that the first elucidation of the concept is by Brown, who did not use the term “relational values” but alluded to “values in the relational realm” (Brown 1984:233). This paper views that contribution as foundational to the concept of relational values but not of the relational-values literature.

Starting in 2011, advocates of the concept of relational values suggested another way of assigning value that is not concerned with how nature can be means to ends, i.e., instrumental, or if components of nature are ends in and of themselves, i.e., intrinsic. The logic is that human relationships with nature are valuable, but quite heterogenous, and thus do not fit perfectly into the ideas of valuing nature instrumentally, i.e., what can this component of nature do for me, and/or intrinsically, i.e., this component of nature is valuable independent of what it can do for me. Relational-values scholars “argued that intrinsic and instrumental values were too narrow conceptually to include ideas crucial to human-ecosystem relationships” (Chan et al. 2018:A2), and thus have continued to advance the concept of relational values as a way to better understand the complexity of valuations within social-ecological systems.

As the name suggests, the concept of relational values assigns meaning to human-nature relationships. How that meaning is to be understood is still debated. Some scholars view relational values as “more contextual, expressed as values about relationships to a thing/component of nature, rather than values of a thing/component of nature” (Pape 2023:107, emphasis in original). Others suggest that relational values are both of and about things (Chan et al. 2018). Some posit that relational values have instrumental and intrinsic aspects but are a separate category of value articulation (Deplazes-Zemp and Chapman 2021). One way to understand a relational value is that it can be a personal expression about how that person values their relationships with specific components of nature that they interact with: the value is in the relationship with nature. As Norton and Sanbeg put it, relational-values attributions emphasize “particularities of the experience of culturally placed individuals who live out a narrative, based on guiding metaphors, that gives meaning to their actions and choices” (2021:711). Relational values, then, are personal and cultural articulations of the value of nature tied to peoples’ relationships with nature, e.g., “that tree is part of my family.” The relational values that are attributed in these personal narratives, often based on guiding metaphors, “are measurable, in the sense of the strength of commitment to an ideal or aspired relationship with nature” (Chan et al. 2018:A6), but empirical methods of studying relational values are still evolving.

Since 2016 a first wave of empirical anthropological/sociological research utilizing the concept of relational values has emerged. The goal of such research is for stakeholders to share ideas, values, and knowledge with researchers, with the possibility of creating more inclusive public-policy processes and promoting more thoughtful ecosystem governance. The naming of relational values as a concept triggered the ability for it to exert substantial power. Studies related to values beyond instrumental/intrinsic previously existed, but without a unifying name, their ability to exert power was constrained.

The numerous analytical studies since 2016 employing the concept of relational values and its inherent double-naming processes have explored value conflicts between government-conservation programs and landowners (Chapman et al. 2019), the sustainable management of watersheds (Arias-Arévalo et al. 2017), participation in river rehabilitation projects (Mould et al. 2020), and how alpine farmers make environmental decisions (Chapman and Deplazes-Zemp 2022), just to name a few. Some of the relational values articulated via empirical work in these studies range from history of the land (Chapman et al. 2019), to cultural heritage (Arias-Arévalo et al. 2017), to living with birds (Mould et al. 2020), to respect for hunted animals (Chapman and Deplazes-Zemp 2022). These named values are a prime example of how relational values incorporate ideas and concepts that better represent the multitude of ways that people value nature by focusing on how people see various relationships with nature as meaningful.

Knowledge derived from these types of double-naming studies, i.e., relational values as the first naming and the specific relational values as the second naming, and what I have termed the relational-values apparatus, has the potential to be useful information for stakeholders concerned with managing facets of complex social-ecological systems. Unsurprisingly, the proliferation of relational-values scholarship has also produced literature questioning the benefit and conceptual worth of relational values. Maier and Feest (2016) proclaim that all values are relational between a valuing subject and a valued object, and thus labeling a new category of valuation “relational” is confusing. Some have proposed that relational values are just an epistemological framing tool (Stålhammar and Thorén 2019), not a third category of value articulation. James (2022) claims that relational values are problematic because their usefulness is hard to determine, thus the concept is hard to justify. Luque-Lora (2023) heavily critiques the theoretical, pragmatic, and political use of the concept of relational values, going so far as to say the concept is counterproductive to the aims of relational values. Luque-Lora, like Maier and Feest (2016), argues all values are relational and the addition of another category of valuation diminishes the relational aspects of instrument, intrinsic, and held values. Although many of the criticisms against the concept of relational values have been previously discussed by relational-values advocates (see: Chan et al. 2018, Himes and Muraca 2018, Himes et al. 2024), the important characteristic of these articles is that they denote meaningful pushbacks against the growing relational-values apparatus. The perceived need to argue against relational values and its growing power/knowledge dynamics is a clear signal of the existence of the relational-values apparatus. The power that the relational-values apparatus has begun to exert within academia, and at academia's interface with policy and management, is based on the apparatus’s ability to produce, quickly by academic standards, new knowledge, which is notable, but also raises questions.

THE POWER OF THE RELATIONAL-VALUES APPARATUS

At the time of writing, Chan et al.’s 2016 PNAS article has gathered over 1700 citations and the 2015 article by Díaz et al. explaining the IPBES Conceptual Framework where relational values are discussed has over 2700 citations. In 2018 a special issue in Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability brought numerous academics together to discuss and consider the formulations and applications of the concept of relational values. Many articles from this special issue have hundreds of citations themselves. In addition to the ever-expanding scholarship regarding relational values, “the term has gained prompt and plentiful currency in environmental decision-making and policy formulation” (Luque-Lora 2023:412). For example, the Dutch government has explicitly recognized relational values in their forest policy and management strategies (Mattijssen et al. 2020). Additionally, the concept of relational values continues to feature prominently in the IPBES’s 2022 summary assessment of the values of nature (IPBES 2022), a report meant to guide policymakers at the local, national, and international levels. Thusly, academic articles, and the journals that publish them, are all constitutive of the relational-values apparatus. So too are conferences and symposiums that highlight research using the concept of relational values, many of which encourage policymakers and environmental managers to attend them in addition to academics. Wherever there is discourse regarding how the concept of relational values can improve social-ecological systems, the relational-values apparatus is present.

After a brief survey of the discursive terrain, it is apparent that the concept of relational values has academic and political appeal. As Foucault suggests, “The exercise of power perpetually creates knowledge and, conversely, knowledge constantly induces effects of power” (1980:52). Thusly, this academic and political appeal is in part because of relational values’ ability to exert power, for academics, policymakers, etc. What began as an inclusive idea meant to incorporate the plurality of ways that people conceive of the value of nature has grown into an apparatus spreading, in a capillary fashion, knowledge about individual and community values regarding nature throughout academia and beyond. This again conforms with Foucault’s theory of power, in that a “relation of force,” e.g., a study employing the concept of relational values, or even this very paper, implies a “relation of power” (1980:189). After all, papers are written to be read. Power, within Foucauldian theory, is not inherently bad or good (Gaventa 2003), but can be wielded for those purposes, although a discussion regarding bad and good is certainly beyond the scope of this paper. Accordingly, it is important to pay attention to how knowledge created by the relational-values apparatus exerts power over individuals, and how some of those individuals go on to produce new knowledge within the relational-values apparatus, thus increasing the power that apparatus is exerting over individuals. Once again, this reinforcing feedback loop is not necessarily bad, but for the concept of relational values to be properly considered by academics, policymakers, etc., it is critical to highlight its power/knowledge dynamics.

It is important to note that the relational-values apparatus is not exerting power in a vacuum. Values of nature have been previously named, e.g., instrumental and intrinsic, and people’s particular values according to those types have long been identified and named in the literature and affect policy and management, i.e., monetary instrumental values of nature drive most management decisions and substantial policy exists to moderate how and where management happens to protect the intrinsic values of nature (Himes et al. 2024). The intent of relational-values knowledge, rather than knowledge about instrumental and intrinsic value, is, according to many of its proponents, to give voice, i.e., power, to the importance of aspects of nature often neglected in the dichotomy of intrinsic and instrumental value that are frequently important to marginalized people, i.e., those with less power (Chan et al. 2020). The relational-values apparatus may then be attempting to redistribute power in more equitable ways through recognitional justice processes, particularly recognizing different epistemologies and ontologies, with a goal of more just and sustainable futures (Chan et al. 2020; Raymond et al. 2023). Assessing the success of these power-related endeavors is a pressing research need.

CONCLUSIONS

In summary, there is no normative implication to the disclosure of the relational-values apparatus. My intention with this paper has been to name and briefly explain this power-exerting assemblage to create more transparency around the concept of relational values. Furthermore, transparency of how relational values’ power can be conceived allows for the knowledge that is generated by the relational-values apparatus to be operationalized, with eyes wide open, by those tasked with managing facets of complex social-ecological systems. A regional-government conservation administrator who does not understand the complexity of the various ways that members of a local community value their relationships with nature risks marginalizing certain people and reducing resiliency in the social-ecological system they partially manage. If recognitional justice and resiliency in a social-ecological system are goals for natural resource managers/policymakers, then information gathered from the relational-values apparatus can be useful. If these are not the goals of natural resource managers/policymakers, then knowledge utilizing the concept of relational values may be less important. Employing the concept of relational values then poses these questions: How is the knowledge useful? To whom? For what?

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