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CONCERTED ACTION: Environmental Valuation in Europe (EVE) |
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Summary of EVE Workshop 2Natural Capital
Plenary Contributions:
Workshop Summary:In the last few decades there has been a process of extending the formal domination over nature, by talking about extracting values and knowledge from the point of view of valuation and accumulation. This is most striking in the context of GMOs, where an institutional framework has rapidly grown up for rationalising and justifying the process of extracting marketable value for biological components. This is a type of formal domination which could have dramatic consequences for access to survival and welfare at an international level. Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), from the viewpoint of economic and capital circuits, no longer represent knowledge claims about systems, but rather a potential for extraction. This process, it was argued, both nourished the circuits of capital by producing added value, and was a process of dilapidation of societies and ecosystems which, in a sense, become the disrupted residue behind those forms of appropriation. The process of valuation of GM stocks is also a process of devaluation of the ecosystems and societies which are neglected. Two types of attitude emerged in answer to the question as to the possibilities of learning about people's ethical attitude in terms of knowing about nature, society or human nature:
The workshop on natural capital formed distinct links with several other EVE workshops. There were direct links with Workshop 1 in terms of themes: the problems of different scales of analysis, complexity, and indeterminacy, as well as issues about understanding or representing ecosystems, which can equally be about societies. This workshop also had strong thematic links with considerations of sustainable development (covered in Workshop 4), but there was only a small overlap. Some issues relating to the area of 'value of life' and 'life support systems' (Workshop 6) and the question of benefit transfer ( Workshop 7) were raised. The most explicit link was to Workshop 8 on green accounting as0 preparing the programme and issues for that workshop. Many of the people working on green accounting and environmental statistics issues were invited to ensure their participation in the debate and to raise the awareness of different agendas and the potential for building links. Three major areas of interest emerged in the workshop, based on current European research activity:
Economic systems can be considered in a systems-type approach, as involving the delivery of social welfare (not just from produced economic goods, but also from environmental services) within a relatively utilitarian framework. There is possibly a process-interdependence at different levels of aggregation. If that type of representation is taken, and insistence made on complimentarity for economic and ecological functioning, this is a way of framing the question of ecological systems - interpreted in standard economics as furnishing inputs, amenity services, and absorbing wastes. The question becomes the extent to which we can work out the critical or fundamental parts of the system, and which of them need to be managed on the interface. Translating this representation into a neo-classical economic framework, leads to a variety of inter-temporal models which can, on paper, have all of the categories of environmental services, natural resources, waste disposal and so on. There are models incorporating all of these, and each one can generate different formula about categories which should be included in calculation of 'net national product', indicating the sustainable welfare delivery potential of the system to a fair degree of accuracy. Starting from a structural approach, it is quite easy to move into a neo-classical monetary valuation framework, where the debate is mature and the positions clear. However, to avoid using values which look acceptable in the formal model, but are empirically hard to believe, the problem needs to be restructured. The question arises of how to get from this model to the neo-classical equilibrium model. The starting point is in the representation of production and consumption, and from there to move to consider social welfare and distribution. On the basis of Arrows' impossibility theorem, the problem of social choice cannot reasonably be solved. If the problem of uncertainty is added, the problem of attitudes to uncertainty cannot be solved either. The question of social significance must be re-specified in order to deal with a judgement of the difficulties found in incomplete understanding and predictability of life support or natural resource systems. Rather than defining approaches in a dialectic way (i.e. monetary valuation against the rest), a preferable notion is that monetary valuations (representing ways of grasping problems of decisions, judgements, trade-offs etc.) can be given precise legitimacy in some domains. However, outside those domains such valuation becomes much more controversial. Those domains have different justification principles and social contingencies for problem resolving. On the one hand this is seen as the 'crowding-in' of rationality into archaic practices but on the other, where it is seen as being inappropriate, a contest is felt to be better than crowding-in. If the types of justification are pluralised and made to argue their cases against each other, this will become almost a democracy of justifications. The work outlined in Roger Levett's paper was triggered by concern amongst the Countryside Commission, English Heritage, English Nature and the Environment Agency, that they were all using the term 'environmental capital' (EC) but with different meanings. He considered a range of benefits, from contributions to global ecological security (through carbon sequestration), to aesthetic enjoyment, and concluded that each type of benefit needed to be assessed in a different way. EC was described as a decision tool, useful for regional strategic planning, land-use planning, and individual site-briefs. The ideology behind EC is anthropogenic, but not utilitarian, pluralist and inclusive, but not reductionist. Although the idea of EC was only in its infancy, some real-world experimentation had just finished at the time of the workshop, and the feedback was that the suggestions made by the research were basically valid, although in need of fine-tuning. Anton Steurer's paper attempted to synthesise a number of statements about the role of valuation methods in national accounting. He argued that if we are concerned with inputs of natural resources (i.e. coal or forest), then we can put meaningful commercial value on them. If, however, we are concerned with environmental amenities, with areas accessed by the public (either as individuals, or as local or public goods), then results can be obtained by using methods such as the willingness to pay or accept. This has plausibility and practical relevance, however when we get to life support systems, the problem gets more complex, and with existence values there is little meaning in the concept of a demand curve. There is an emergent, notion that increasing aggregation leads to increasing obstacles to meaningful use of monetary valuation (explored in the GREENSTAMP project), but this is far from universal. He drew parallels to work by Funtowicz and Ravetz, on post-normal science. They point out that normal science was established by its ability to pose problems to which relatively precise scientific responses could be found, and introduce the idea of a Methodological Precautionary Principle (MPP) for science, whereby science should not pose questions which it cannot answer. MPP allowed science to have its aura of providing depth of knowledge, as it was protected from going into areas where controversy was so strong as to influence the legitimacy of scientific practice. Historically, this legitimacy has been undermined. The atomic bomb, for example, represented learning about nature, but the only way to really learn about nature was to detonate the bomb and observe the (irreversible) consequences. The same points can be made of GMOs. Science can be argued to be in this domain already - the stakes include high ethical stakes as well as uncertainties, and a new code of practice is needed. There cannot be a robust internal legitimation process, as there will be unstable feedback between issues on ethics, uncertainty, distribution and mortality, which can only be solved through social legitimation rather than arbitration. These criteria of acceptability cannot be met solely by the internal conventions of economic marginal analysis, nor in the case of science by the internal conventions of traditional scientific methodologies. The technical contribution to science is no longer automatically legitimate, and must obtain legitimation in a larger social context.
Workshop Participants:
Contact Details: Martin O'ConnorCentre d'Economie et d'Ethique pour l'Environnement et le Développement Université de Versailles-Saint Quentin en Yvelines 47 boulevard Vauban Guyancourt 78280 France Tel: +33 1 39 25 53 75 (C3ED Secretariat) +33 1 39 25 56 60 (direct line) Fax: +33 1 39 25 53 00 (C3ED) E-mail: [email protected]
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