PES programs have become a cornerstone of global conservation policy, operating on the principle that those who benefit from ecosystem services such as clean water, carbon storage, or biodiversity should pay those who provide them. The model assumes that monetary incentives, delivered through conditional contracts, will motivate landholders to conserve natural resources. Billions of dollars have flowed through such schemes worldwide, from Costa Rica’s forest stewardship programs to watershed protection initiatives across Latin America and Southeast Asia. Yet the approach has long been criticized for imposing a narrow economic logic on relationships between people and nature that many communities understand in fundamentally different terms.

The Batak people of Tapanuli, who live in and around the Batang Toru forest ecosystem, offer a striking counterexample. This region is home to the Tapanuli orangutan, one of the world’s most endangered great ape species, and the forest faces mounting pressure from infrastructure development, including a controversial hydropower project. The research team conducted extensive fieldwork using participant observation, oral histories, in-depth interviews, and group discussions to understand how Batak communities conceptualize their obligations to the forest and to each other.

What the researchers found is a governance system in which contributions to conservation are structured through customary institutions rather than market contracts. Two arrangements in particular organize these obligations: the Jago Bondar system and Parpatihan. These are not payment schemes in the conventional sense but socially recognized institutional frameworks that tie individual contributions to rights of access, participation, and belonging within the community. Contributions take the form of rice, benzoin resin, labor, and ritual practice, and they function not as transactions or even as generalized reciprocity but as structured obligations necessary for the reproduction of ecosystem governance over time.

The concept of relational payment that the authors develop describes contributions that are embedded in normative systems, tied to social identity, and sustained by enduring relationships between people and their environment. Unlike a market transaction, which is complete once money changes hands, a relational payment creates and maintains an ongoing bond. The person who contributes labor to maintain a sacred grove or offers rice during a ceremonial cycle is not purchasing a service; they are fulfilling an obligation that affirms their membership in a community and their responsibility to the living systems that community depends upon.

This distinction matters because it challenges the universality of transaction-based PES frameworks. When conservation programs arrive in Indigenous territories with pre-designed payment structures, they often fail to recognize that the community may already have functioning systems of obligation and reward that operate on entirely different logic. The Batak case demonstrates that the question is not simply whether Indigenous peoples participate in PES programs but whether those programs can accommodate or even perceive the relational values that already govern human-nature interactions in these settings.

The findings connect to a broader scholarly debate about value pluralism in ecosystem services research. Scholars such as Kai Chan and colleagues have argued that relational values, which emphasize the importance of relationships between people and nature rather than instrumental benefits or intrinsic worth alone, deserve greater attention in environmental policy. The IPBES assessment framework has similarly moved toward recognizing diverse value systems beyond economic valuation. The Batak study provides concrete ethnographic evidence for how these abstract debates play out on the ground, showing that relational values are not merely philosophical categories but are actively embedded in governance institutions with real ecological consequences.

The authors argue that rather than extending PES into every context, conservation policy should reconsider what constitutes payment in settings where value is produced through enduring social-ecological relationships. This does not mean rejecting PES entirely but recognizing its limits and creating space for alternative frameworks that acknowledge the full range of ways communities organize their responsibilities toward ecosystems. The researchers suggest that conservation practitioners working in Indigenous territories should begin by understanding existing governance arrangements rather than assuming that external payment mechanisms are needed to motivate stewardship.

The implications extend beyond Tapanuli. As PES programs continue to expand globally, particularly through carbon markets and biodiversity offset schemes, the Batak case serves as a reminder that the market-based model rests on assumptions about human motivation and social organization that do not hold universally. Communities around the world have developed sophisticated systems for governing common resources through obligation, ritual, and relational ties, and these systems have often sustained ecosystems for centuries. Recognizing and working with these existing structures, rather than replacing them with monetary contracts, may prove essential for conservation that is both effective and just.

The study, published in Environmental Management, draws on qualitative methods including participant observation, oral histories, in-depth interviews, and group discussions conducted with Batak communities in the Simaretong and Simardangiang areas. The research was supported by collaborations with CIRAD in France and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and the authors acknowledge the communities who shared their knowledge and governance practices as the foundation of this work.

Subject of Research: Relational payment systems and Indigenous governance of ecosystem services among the Batak people of Tapanuli, Indonesia

Article Title: Relationships Not Transactions: Relational Payment for Ecosystem Services Among the Batak People of Tapanuli, Indonesia

Article References: Harahap, H. A., Yonariza, Boissière, M., & Maynard, S. (2026). Relationships Not Transactions: Relational Payment for Ecosystem Services Among the Batak People of Tapanuli, Indonesia. Environmental Management, 76(10), Article 342. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-026-02592-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00267-026-02592-0

Keywords: Payment for Ecosystem Services, Batak people, Indigenous governance, relational values, Tapanuli, Indonesia, environmental management, value pluralism, conservation policy, social-ecological systems, Batang Toru forest, ecosystem services

The research, led by Lindsey West of Queen’s University Belfast with Tanzanian colleagues Isabellah Luhanga and Irene C. Mapunda and Robert D. Fish of Imperial College London, drew on semi-structured interviews with all 22 community Conservation Officers working across five coastal districts. These men, aged between 33 and 68 and mostly small-scale fishers, had participated in a community-based marine turtle conservation programme for periods ranging from six to twenty years, with a mean of sixteen. The programme began in 2001 as a partnership between a Tanzanian non-governmental organisation and communities around Mafia Island Marine Park, where rates of egg harvesting and the killing of nesting females were high. It later expanded to Kilwa, Kibiti, Mkuranga and Kigamboni, districts that host nesting by green turtles, Chelonia mydas, and hawksbill turtles, Eretmochelys imbricata, with up to 500 clutches laid along the coast each year.

The theoretical stakes are considerable. Global conservation policy has long been built on the assumption that local actors are driven primarily by economic motives, an assumption embedded in market-based instruments such as Payments for Ecosystem Services. In that framing, participants are constructed as self-interested calculators of costs and benefits. Yet conservation is an inherently social, cultural and political process, and the authors point out that economic theories struggle to explain why anyone would protect a species that delivers no direct livelihood benefit. Marine turtles are precisely such a species: they are a global conservation priority threatened by exploitation, bycatch, pollution, coastal development and climate change, but they do not put food on the table for the men who guard them.

The study grounded its analysis in Self-determination Theory, the influential psychological framework that distinguishes intrinsic motivation, arising from the inherent satisfaction of an activity, from extrinsic motivation, performed for separable rewards. According to the theory, motivation becomes self-endorsed when three psychological needs are met: autonomy, competence and relatedness. The researchers also drew on the concept of relational values, values that emerge from human-nature interactions and from human relationships involving nature, expressed as care, reciprocity and responsibility. Using thematic analysis, they coded the interview transcripts both deductively, against seven features of relational values identified in the literature, and inductively, allowing new themes to emerge from the narratives themselves.

The findings on initial participation were strikingly consistent. The Conservation Officers signed up because the programme’s goals aligned with values they already held. Instrumental concerns mattered: they had watched fish catches decline and feared for families and friends dependent on fisheries. One officer explained his decision bluntly, saying that if the environment was not protected it would mean death, and that comparing the fish of the past with the present convinced him to get inside and fight. Moral values were equally powerful. Several described a sense that turtles, as living beings with the same survival needs as humans, deserved defence as fellow creatures. Some recalled the distress of watching turtles publicly slaughtered for meat and oil in their youth, memories that generated empathy and a desire to alleviate suffering.

Bequest values and place attachment completed the motivational picture. The officers spoke of inheriting a healthy marine environment from ancestors and felt a duty to pass it on, haunted by the near-disappearance of the dugong, a marine mammal once regularly sighted in Tanzanian waters and now extremely rare. One participant said the prospect of his children having to travel far to see a dugong pained him greatly, and he feared the same fate for turtles. Because most had been born, raised and married in the villages where they worked, their sense of place was profound, and it was reinforced by turtle behaviour itself: females return to the same nesting beaches season after season, creating an unmistakable bond between the animals and a specific village. Local knowledge of coasts, turtles and community personalities gave the officers a feeling of competence, and their decision to apply, sometimes against peer pressure, reflected genuine autonomy.

Over the following two decades, the researchers found, motivation evolved and became increasingly relational. The practice of care for turtles deepened into reciprocal bonds; one officer admitted to sleeping on the beach while a turtle nested so he could escort it safely back to the ocean, and recalled the act fondly rather than as a burden. The officers also grasped the ecological role of turtles in maintaining coral reefs and seagrass meadows that support inshore fisheries, understanding that where these creatures thrive, fish will follow. From this care grew a stewardship identity, captured in one officer’s declaration that the job was already in his blood and in his soul, and that he did not care whether he was paid. Participation also forged new friendships within the officer network, which evolved into a community of practice built on shared work and mutual support.

Social recognition proved to be a decisive engine of persistence. Community members came to see the officers as environmental knowledge holders, reporting nesting turtles and eggs at risk, and the officers took pride in the visible acceptance of their work. Their regular, if small, conservation payments even functioned as social capital, enabling access to credit at local shops and allowing generous contributions to village fundraising. Trust translated into influence: officers were consulted on financial matters, community projects and village leadership, some were elected to local government positions, and alliances formed with police and district officials. The authors interpret this social standing through a Foucauldian lens, as power that exists only in relational interactions rather than as a personal possession, a valued and unexpected benefit that participants were strongly motivated to maintain.

Persistence came despite real hostility. Some villagers continued to trade and consume turtle meat covertly, littering beaches with carcasses to demonstrate that the officers could not enforce control. Officers endured verbal abuse, threats, and pressure from some village leaders, including reported attempts to remove them from their positions. They responded with what the authors describe as performative participation, maintaining humility and friendliness while recognising that they could not win everyone over. Notably, when payments became irregular between 2014 and 2015 due to funding problems, the officers continued their work regardless. The authors suggest that financial uncertainty may even have protected their intrinsic motivation from being crowded out, and may have signalled to communities that rewards are not a prerequisite for stewardship.

The study’s implications reach far beyond Tanzanian beaches. The authors caution that over-reliance on monetary incentives risks undermining the very relationships that sustain long-term participation, and they argue that motivation should be understood as a relational, continually unfolding process rooted in dynamic ties among nature, people and place, rather than a static cognitive state. They acknowledge limitations: all participants were men, reflecting structural barriers that keep women out of formal conservation roles, and the sample is subject to survivorship bias since it captures only those who stayed. Even so, the message is clear. Conservation programmes designed around payments alone may miss the deeper wellsprings of human commitment, including trust, reciprocity, care and collective responsibility. Where policymakers learn to recognise and nurture these relational values, they may find that the most durable guardians of biodiversity are not bought, but made through belonging.

Subject of Research: Motivations for long-term participation in community-based marine turtle conservation in Tanzania

Article Title: Evolving motivations for participation in community-based conservation: A relational perspective

Article References: West, L., Luhanga, I., Mapunda, I. C., & Fish, R. D. (2026). Evolving motivations for participation in community-based conservation: A relational perspective. Ambio. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-026-02491-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13280-026-02491-y

Keywords: community-based conservation, marine turtles, motivation, relational values, Tanzania, Self-determination Theory, stewardship, intrinsic motivation, payments for ecosystem services, place attachment, social capital, coastal communities

The distinction matters because restoration and conservation are not value-neutral sciences. Winters emphasizes that they are normative practices, conjoining empirical facts with value judgments to determine what ought to be done in a particular circumstance. Every decision about what counts as success, what losses are tolerable, and what interventions are permissible already embeds normative commitments, whether or not practitioners acknowledge them. When Camacho and co-authors propose replacing Caribbean corals with Pacific species, they are not simply offering a technical fix; they are making an implicit axiological claim about what a reef is and why it merits protection. The essay’s provocation, Winters argues, lies less in the unorthodox intervention itself than in the challenge it poses to how the field conceptualizes a coral reef in the first place.

Environmental philosophers have long distinguished among instrumental, relational, and intrinsic value, a framework developed in influential work by Chan and colleagues and systematically reviewed by Himes and colleagues. Instrumental value treats nature as a means to human ends: reefs matter because they supply fisheries, shoreline protection, tourism revenue, and livelihoods. Relational value rests on the connections between people and particular places—cultural identity, heritage, and the continuity of a community’s relationship with a specific reef. Intrinsic value, by contrast, holds that reefs possess worth independent of any utility, derived benefit, or human relationship whatsoever. The argument for ecological replacement rests squarely on the instrumental frame: if the value of a reef is derived from the benefits it provides, then any object delivering comparable benefits can, in principle, substitute for it. Caribbean corals become interchangeable parts.

Under that logic, Camacho and colleagues contend that if the goal is to preserve the ecosystem services of Caribbean reefs—complex three-dimensional structure supporting fisheries, coastal protection, and tourism—then importing Indo-Pacific corals capable of surviving escalating thermal stress is a rational, perhaps necessary, response. Winters is careful to state that he is not advocating or even condoning ecological replacement. His aim is to force the discussion that the proposal’s value assumption demands: why preserve or restore coral reefs at all, and what is the nature of their value? The answer, he argues, is not academic hair-splitting, because the type of value a reef holds directly determines which interventions are acceptable. If reefs have only instrumental value, substitution is permissible—even, in an absurd limiting case, the construction of an ecosystem-services machine. If value is relational, modification may be allowed but not replacement. If value is intrinsic, then anything altering the reef’s nature may be unacceptable.

The broader context makes the stakes concrete. Tropical reefs worldwide face escalating bleaching events driven by rising ocean temperatures, declining coral cover, and structural erosion as dead corals crumble. The causes are a complex interplay of local and global stressors, and the risks are both deterministic—increasingly frequent thermal anomalies—and stochastic, as small, fragmented populations spiral into extinction vortices, a dynamic described in classic work by Shaffer and by Gilpin and Soulé. For the better part of a decade, the dominant response has been to scale up coral repopulation locally, aiming to increase coral coverage at lower cost. But critics have questioned the expense, scalability, and efficacy of these efforts, with recent analyses by Hughes and colleagues, Streit and colleagues, and Mulà and colleagues arguing that restoration cannot be scaled globally to compensate for climate-driven loss. Others, including Peixoto and colleagues, dispute the premise that active intervention no longer improves outcomes.

Much restoration discourse frames the work as buying time—not to return reefs to a historical baseline, which most now regard as illusory given a century of climatic and ecological change, but to help extant populations endure intensifying thermal stress. Within that framing, addressing stochastic risk means preserving remnant genetic diversity, for example through genetic rescue, an approach advanced by Baums and colleagues and, most recently, by Baker and colleagues in Science, who argue for proactive assisted gene flow for Caribbean corals. Addressing deterministic risk, by contrast, is often imagined as requiring technological interventions: passive protection such as shading or cloud brightening, or enhancement of thermal tolerance through assisted evolution. Winters observes that these approaches share an implicit physical conceptualization of the reef—the goal is to keep the actual, historically contingent assemblage alive. Ecological replacement abandons that conceptualization entirely, decoupling the reef’s physical manifestation from its perceived function for humans.

The tension is not new. Earlier debates over the ecological and social value of artificial reefs, and the long-running controversy within conservation biology over grounding protection in ecosystem services rather than biodiversity—famously crystallized in McCauley’s ‘Selling out on nature’—turned on similar questions about what counts as the thing being saved. What Camacho and colleagues add is the sharpest possible version of the question: whether a reef’s identity can be substituted entirely and the result still count as restoration. Their proposal has generated strongly polarized responses, with Ritson-Williams, Mumby, and Steneck arguing in PNAS that introduced species will not save Caribbean reefs, Loya and van Woesik countering with a case for process-based recovery over ecological replacement, and Camacho’s team replying that replacement research is vital precisely because of uncertainty and unprecedented stress.

Beyond the philosophical dispute, Winters takes seriously the ecological and ethical objections. An introduced coral capable of persisting where native corals cannot could disperse via larvae far beyond any introduction site, placing countries that never consented to the intervention at risk—a procedural injustice in itself. The risk of unwanted spread has ample precedent in the assisted colonization literature, notably Ricciardi and Simberloff’s critique of assisted colonization as a conservation strategy. Winters judges these objections compelling enough to warrant considerable caution before any field trial proceeds. But he also insists that resolving the ecological risks would not settle the underlying question: by what standard of value should any restoration intervention be judged a success? A monitoring metric appropriate to instrumental value, such as restored service delivery, is not interchangeable with one appropriate to intrinsic value, such as the persistence of a specific evolutionary lineage, or relational value, such as a community’s continuing bond with a particular reef.

Winters ultimately concludes that the argument for ecological replacement, resting on instrumental value, either abandons the notion that reefs have intrinsic worth or assumes Caribbean reefs have already eroded past the point of retaining any—and he considers that a bridge too far at present, not because it may prove false, but because the field has neglected sustained analysis of reef value. If we accept the instrumental framing, ecological replacement becomes one of many options requiring comparative evaluation; if we believe reefs hold intrinsic value that cannot be recovered to a historical state, we face the older philosophical worry articulated by Elliot as faking nature. The practical implication is direct: restoration programs, funders, and agencies should be explicit about which type of value each intervention is meant to secure, because limited resources and intended beneficiaries can only be assessed in light of the value sought. Determining what is being preserved, for whom, and at the expense of what alternatives, Winters writes, is not a scientific or technical question at all. It is an ethical one, and the future of the Caribbean’s reefs may depend on answering it before the next intervention is deployed.

Subject of Research: The normative value frameworks underlying proposed ecological replacement of Caribbean coral reefs with Indo-Pacific coral species.

Article Title: Why bother? What kind of value do Caribbean coral reefs have?

Article References: Winters, R. S. (2026). Why bother? What kind of value do Caribbean coral reefs have?. Coral Reefs. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00338-026-02960-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00338-026-02960-6

Keywords: coral reefs, Caribbean, ecological replacement, coral restoration, ecosystem services, intrinsic value, instrumental value, relational values, conservation ethics, assisted colonization, climate change, biodiversity

The study, led by Aya Takagi, associate professor at Yokohama National University’s Faculty of Environment and Information Sciences, together with co-author Ryosuke Nakadai, a lecturer in the same faculty, set out to answer a question that has long puzzled environmental social scientists: why does support for climate action vary so widely in societies where the underlying science is broadly accepted? In Japan, skepticism about the reality of human-caused climate change is relatively rare, and yet enthusiasm for concrete climate measures differs markedly across the population. That gap suggested to the researchers that scientific understanding alone could not explain the politics of environmental policy — that cultural worldviews and personal relationships with nature might be doing substantial work beneath the surface.

In June 2025, the team surveyed 1,133 people across Japan, measuring four distinct dimensions: their cultural worldviews, their values regarding nature, their perceptions of environmental risks, and their support for different categories of environmental policy. The policy categories were deliberately separated into three groups: measures explicitly identified with climate change, biodiversity conservation measures that are related to climate change, and stand-alone biodiversity conservation measures with no explicit climate framing. This design allowed the researchers to isolate whether cultural divisions attach to the substance of environmental protection or to the label of climate change itself.

The results were strikingly asymmetric. Cultural worldviews mattered most, by a considerable margin, when the policy in question was framed as climate change. Respondents with more hierarchical worldviews — people who are more comfortable with stratified rather than egalitarian social relations — tended to perceive climate change as less risky and expressed notably weaker support for climate change measures compared with respondents holding more egalitarian views. This pattern echoes a large body of research, much of it from the United States and other politically polarized countries, showing that hierarchical and individualistic worldviews are associated with diminished climate concern. What makes the Japanese data remarkable is what happened when the policy subject shifted.

When respondents were asked about biodiversity conservation measures that are related to climate change, the negative association with hierarchical worldviews became considerably weaker. And for stand-alone biodiversity conservation measures — policies with no explicit connection to climate change — the researchers found no clear direct association between hierarchical worldview and policy support at all. In other words, the cultural fault lines that cleave public opinion on climate policy largely dissolve when the conversation turns to protecting species, ecosystems, and the natural world on its own terms. Support for conservation, it appears, is not distributed along the same cultural gradients that structure climate attitudes.

The findings point to a potential strategic advantage for biodiversity conservation as a prominent component of climate policy. Framing environmental action around conservation goals may allow governments and advocates to build coalitions that transcend the worldview-based divisions that often stall climate legislation. However, Takagi and Nakadai are careful to draw the boundaries of what their data can support. The policies examined in the survey were substantively different measures, not the same policy wearing different rhetorical costumes, and the study identified associations rather than causal relationships. The results do not mean, the researchers caution, that a contentious climate policy could simply be repackaged as biodiversity conservation and thereby become popular. What the data show is that, in Japan at present, conservation policies occupy cultural common ground that climate-labeled policies do not.

The study also identified a second and arguably more universal source of agreement: relational values of nature. This concept refers to the personal and cultural connections people hold with the natural world — the sense of identity, responsibility, attachment, and reciprocity that shapes how individuals relate to landscapes, wildlife, and ecosystems. Across the entire sample, participants with stronger relational values expressed greater support for all three types of environmental policy examined, including explicitly climate-focused measures. Relational values, unlike cultural worldviews, appeared to operate as a unifying force rather than a dividing one, cutting across the social orientations that otherwise fragment environmental opinion.

General scientific knowledge also played a role, though a selective one. Respondents with higher levels of general scientific understanding were more supportive of biodiversity conservation measures, including those related to climate change. Notably, the survey did not find knowledge to be the decisive factor in climate policy support, reinforcing the study’s central lesson: what people know matters, but how they see society and what nature means to them may matter more. For science communicators, this suggests that facts alone are an incomplete instrument, and that appeals rooted in people’s lived and cultural relationships with nature may travel further than arguments centered on abstract planetary risk.

The research team now plans to move from observation to experiment. By presenting identical policies with different framings while holding their substance constant, future studies could determine whether framing itself alters the influence of cultural worldviews on policy support — a question the current correlational design cannot answer. The team also hopes to replicate the findings in countries where environmental issues are far more politically polarized than in Japan, including the United States, and to extend the analytical approach to other contested policy domains such as health and food security. If the pattern holds broadly, it could reshape how governments sequence and package environmental legislation in an era of tight political margins.

“Our ultimate goal is to help design climate and biodiversity policies — and ways of communicating them — that can earn broad public support without deepening social division,” Nakadai said. In a decade defined by both accelerating ecological loss and hardening political polarization, the Japanese survey offers a deceptively simple insight with potentially far-reaching consequences: the fastest route to collective climate action may run through the birds, forests, and oceans that people across the cultural spectrum already cherish, rather than through the contested vocabulary of the climate debate itself.

Subject of Research: How cultural worldviews and relational values of nature shape public support for climate change and biodiversity conservation policies in Japan.

Article Title: Focus on biodiversity conservation may offer a less divisive path to climate action

Article References: Focus on biodiversity conservation may offer a less divisive path to climate action. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: biodiversity conservation, climate policy, cultural worldviews, public opinion survey, relational values, environmental risk perception, Yokohama National University, policy framing, Communications Sustainability, egalitarianism, hierarchical worldviews, Japan

The urgency behind the paper stems from the escalating ecological crisis and the growing recognition that the way humanity values nature shapes how it is protected or destroyed. People value nature in profoundly different ways: instrumentally, for the material benefits it provides; intrinsically, for its existence independent of any human observer; and relationally, through the meanings, identities and social bonds that arise from human–nature interactions. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, or IPBES, emphasized in its 2022 Methodological Assessment of the Diverse Values and Valuation of Nature that most current valuation processes capture only a narrow slice of these values, typically monetary and quantitative ones, which can produce environmental injustices and conflicts while ignoring worldviews of indigenous peoples and local communities.

To translate plural valuation into practice, researchers have identified four values-centered leverage points for transformative change: recognizing the diverse values of nature in valuation methods; embedding those values into decision-making; reforming policies, rights and regulations to internalize nature’s values; and shifting the deeper societal norms, beliefs and goals that underpin how people relate to nature and to each other. Drawing on leverage point theory popularized by Donella Meadows, the authors note that these intervention points cascade in depth—shallower points are easier to act on but yield less change, while deeper points are harder to activate but hold far greater transformative potential when engaged.

The new perspective, the product of two expert workshops hosted by the Open Universiteit in 2022 and 2023, systematically maps how citizen science can strengthen interventions at each of these leverage points. At the first point, recognizing diverse values, citizen science initiatives such as Drinkable Rivers, Curieuze Neuzen in Belgium, and the Dutch Network Ecological Monitoring demonstrate that the questions citizens ask and the species or landscapes they monitor often reflect deeply held values and concerns. Because participants are drawn from varied localities, socio-economic backgrounds and identities, their involvement can widen the spectrum of values that enter formal valuation, though the authors caution that environmental citizen science remains biased toward quantitative data collection, overrepresenting instrumental and intrinsic values while leaving relational values largely implicit.

Measuring relational values—attachments to places, species and nature in general—requires methodological innovation. The researchers point to emerging approaches such as citizens’ written letters to trees, micronarratives and behavioral data on species preferences, which can be combined with ecological measurements to illuminate socio-ecological interactions. They also flag a fundamental trade-off: methods capable of capturing rich detail about people’s values tend to be more complex and time-consuming, reducing the volume of data collected, while high-volume approaches may flatten the very diversity of values that plural valuation seeks to reveal.

At the second leverage point, embedding valuation into inclusive decision-making, the evidence is striking. Citizen-collected air quality data from the Louisiana Bucket Brigade in the United States and the Samen Meten program run by the Dutch national public health institute have shaped governmental policy agendas. In Europe, citizen observatories deliberately link citizens, scientists and decision-makers in shared monitoring of local environments. The authors document cases where citizen science has even entered the courtroom: plastic pollution data gathered by volunteers contributed to a petrochemical company being found liable, and species observations by Swedish citizens have been used in environmental court cases. Participation also reshapes personal decisions, with studies showing that citizen scientists adopt more biodiversity-friendly gardening practices and strengthen their personal connection to nature—effects that ripple outward through the communities and social networks these initiatives create.

Yet the path is not without obstacles. Doubts about the quality of citizen-generated data among scientists and policymakers, persistent power dynamics in decision-making circles, and a lack of agency, skills or resources among decision-makers all constrain uptake. Studies further reveal a persistent demographic skew: citizen science participants tend to be white, highly educated, older and more affluent, which narrows the knowledge produced and limits environmental justice. At the third, deeper leverage point of institutional reform, the authors highlight structural embedding efforts such as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework’s agreement to involve citizens in knowledge co-creation and the more4nature initiative, which seeks to institutionalize collaboration between citizen science projects and authorities responsible for policy implementation and monitoring. But they also warn that institutionalization carries risks: when data flow into analytical pipelines, ties with the volunteers who collected them can weaken, and the sense of pride and emotional enrichment that motivates citizen scientists can erode if their knowledge becomes an untraceable instrument.

The deepest leverage point—shifting societal norms and paradigms—is where citizen science may hold its most profound potential. Empirical studies show that participation strengthens place attachment, nature connectedness and nature-noticing over both short and long timescales. Communities formed around monitoring projects build shared values and collective action, and so-called citizen science ambassadors inspire pro-environmental attitudes in their social circles. The authors caution, however, that it is methodologically difficult to distinguish values genuinely transformed by participation from values participants already held, and some longitudinal studies find no attitude change because participants began with strongly positive orientations toward nature. Measuring such shifts demands new approaches that explicitly track emotional connectedness and underlying norms.

From this analysis the team distills three overarching recommendations. First, recognize and measure: relational values must be made explicit in citizen science design, supported by new quantitative and qualitative methods, since they are both key motivations for participation and outcomes strengthened by it. Second, embrace diversity: plural valuation calls for plural publics, meaning the full variety of citizen science formats—from top-down governmental programs to grassroots community-led efforts—should be cultivated, with flexible roles that allow citizens, scientists and policymakers to grow into varied responsibilities. Third, pursue structural integration: case-by-case policy engagement is growing, but lasting change requires structural funding, long-term collaborations, storytelling that showcases how citizen science has informed decisions, and open science principles that ease institutionalization into policy processes.

The authors conclude that uniting citizen science and plural valuation is not merely an academic win–win but a necessary foundation for inclusive, effective environmental action and conservation. As governments worldwide struggle to meet biodiversity targets amid widening distrust in institutions, the perspective suggests a practical and democratizing pathway: the millions of volunteers already counting birds, measuring rivers and sensing air pollution are not just collecting data—they are articulating, practicing and fostering a richer, more plural vision of what nature is worth, and in doing so, they may be pulling the deepest levers of transformative change.

Subject of Research: Integrating citizen science with plural valuation of nature to leverage transformative change

Article Title: Uniting citizen science and plural valuation: Potential for leveraging transformative change

Article References: Verploegen, H., Dyke, A. J., Ganzevoort, W., Hugé, J., Jacobs, S., Neuteleers, S., Prats López, M., Verschuuren, B., & Wehn, U. (2026). Uniting citizen science and plural valuation: Potential for leveraging transformative change. Ambio. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-026-02458-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13280-026-02458-z

Keywords: citizen science, plural valuation, transformative change, relational values, environmental policy, IPBES, leverage points, biodiversity, nature connectedness, environmental justice, Uniting, citizen