One draws on Indigenous philosophies, which emphasize deep, place-based relationships with local landscapes. Both traditions have recently converged on the idea that relational values should be central to ethical management. Relational value refers to the value that emerges from reciprocal relationships among members of a moral community, encompassing the bonds between people and between people and nature.

The underlying idea is that management practices can communicate to stakeholders how these relationships are preserved and honored through specific conservation initiatives. But Clark identifies a critical vulnerability in this convergence, which he terms the problem of scale. All values, he argues, are scale-dependent, meaning that what counts as a meaningful relationship or a legitimate responsibility can shift dramatically depending on whether one is thinking about a single watershed, a nation, or the planet as a whole.

This scale-dependence creates an asymmetry between the two stewardship traditions. Indigenous philosophies tend to support local sense-of-place values, grounding ethical responsibility in intimate, geographically specific relationships. Adaptive management, by contrast, stresses a decentralized strategy that does not privilege any one scale, allowing decisions to be made at whatever level best fits the ecological or institutional context.

The consequence, according to the essay, is that the two approaches can come into direct conflict when relational values are invoked to motivate management initiatives. Stakeholders who do not share the same scale of concern may find that appeals to relational values deepen rather than resolve their disagreements, ultimately disrupting the very management initiatives those values were meant to support. Importantly, the essay does not conclude that the relational value concept should be abandoned.

Instead, Clark proposes that stewardship should appeal to the principle of care, which he identifies as a fundamental aspect of the relational value concept. Care, in this framing, is not tied to any particular spatial or institutional scale. The key insight is that responsibilities associated with the principle of care are identifiable across multiple scales.

This allows stewardship to successfully appeal to relational values even when stakeholders do not view those values from the same vantage point. The argument offers a theoretical contribution to ongoing debates in environmental ethics and management practice rather than an empirical test of any specific policy. For scientists, ethicists, and practitioners working at the intersection of Indigenous knowledge and adaptive management, the essay suggests that building durable stewardship frameworks may require attending not only to whose values count, but to the scales at which those values are defined.

Subject of Research: Scale-dependent relational values in environmental stewardship ethics

Article Title: Stewardship, relational values, and the problem of scale

Article References: Clark, C. J. (2026). Stewardship, relational values, and the problem of scale. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-026-01157-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13412-026-01157-1

Keywords: environmental stewardship, relational values, adaptive management, Indigenous philosophies, environmental ethics, problem of scale, principle of care, sense of place, moral community, conservation management, Stewardship, relational