Project Summary

The main website for this project can be found at: http://alba.jrc.it/valse/noappletvalse.htm

This project ran under funding from the European Commission’s Environment and Climate Research Programme and was coordinated by Martin O’Connor. A variety of approaches to environmental problems were pursued by different partners. These included citizen’s juries (Aldred and Jacobs, 1997; Aldred and Jacobs, 2000) and contingent valuation (Spash, 1998) by the UK team, a participatory multi-criteria approach by the Italian team (De Marchi et al., 2000), and institutional analysis by the Spanish (Aguilera-Klink, Perez-Moriana and Sanchez-Garcia, 2000; Aguilera-Klink and Sanchez-Garcia, 2002) and French teams (Noel, O’Connor and Sang, 2000). Outcomes and papers were published as a full report (O’Connor et al., 1998) which can be found at http://alba.jrc.it/valse/report.htm, and also as a special issue of Ecological Economics (O’Connor, 2000a; O’Connor, 2000b).

My own work under this project covered extensions to standard survey methods in contingent valuation in order to address ethical and attitudinal factors (Spash, 1998; Spash, 2000; Spash, 2006). This latter work fed directly into my research under the ADVISOR project. My report on the wetlands section of the project can be downloaded by clicking here. (PDF)

In addition, there was much investigation and discussion of participation, deliberation and valuation which lead to my doing some work around deliberative monetary valuation (Niemeyer and Spash, 2001; Spash, 2001b). This is an on-going area of exploration within my research interests. VALSE also fed in to the EVE project, and in terms of the participation area you can see this in terms of the special issue ofGovernment & Policy which I edited (Spash, 2001a).

References

Aguilera-Klink, F., E. Perez-Moriana and J. Sanchez-Garcia (2000) The social construction of scarcity. The case of water in Tenerife (Canary Islands). Ecological Economics 34(2): 233-245.

Aguilera-Klink, F. and J. Sanchez-Garcia (2002) Social participation, institutional change, and land property in the building up of sustainability: A case study of land-use conflict in Tenerife (Canary Islands). Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 20(4): 593-612.

Aldred, J. and M. Jacobs (1997) Citizens and Wetlands: What Priority, If Any, Should be Given to the Creation of Wetlands in the Fens. Lancaster, Centre for the Study of Environmental Change, University of Lancaster. 40.

Aldred, J. and M. Jacobs (2000) Citizens and wetlands: Evaluating the Ely citizen’s jury. Ecological Economics 34(2): 217-232.

De Marchi, B., S. O. Funtowicz, S. Lo Cascio and G. Munda (2000) Combining participative and institutional approaches with multicriteria evaluation. An empirical study for water issues in Troina, Sicily. Ecological Economics 34(2): 267-282.

Niemeyer, S. and C. L. Spash (2001) Environmental valuation analysis, public deliberation and their pragmatic syntheses: A critical appraisal. Environment & Planning C: Government & Policy 19(4): 567-586.

Noel, J. F., M. O’Connor and J. T. K. Sang (2000) The Bouchereau woodland and the transmission of socio-ecological economic value. Ecological Economics 34(2): 247-266.

O’Connor, M. (2000a) Pathways for environmental evaluation: A walk in the (Hanging) Gardens of Babylon. Ecological Economics 34(2): 175-193.

O’Connor, M. (2000b) The VALSE project – an introduction. Ecological Economics34(2): 165-174.

O’Connor, M., S. Funtowicz, F. Agliera-Klink, C. L. Spash and A. Holland (1998) The VALSE Project: Full Final Report. Ispra, European Commission, Joint Research Centre. 396.

Spash, C. L. (1998) Environmental Values and Wetland Ecosystems: CVM, Ethics and Attitudes. Cambridge, Cambridge Research for the Environment, Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge.

Spash, C. L. (2000) Ecosystems, contingent valuation and ethics: The case of wetlands re-creation. Ecological Economics 34(2): 195-215.

Spash, C. L. (2001a) Broadening democracy in environmental policy processes.Environment & Planning C: Government & Policy 19(4): 475-482.

Spash, C. L. (2001b) Deliberative Monetary Valuation. 5th Nordic Environmental Research Conference, University of Aarhus, Denmark.

Spash, C. L. (2006) Non-economic motivation for contingent values: Rights and attitudinal beliefs in the willingness to pay for environmental improvements. Land Economics 82(4): 602-622.