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STEPS Centre Seminar An Institutional Perspective on the Valuation of Biodiversity
Listen to Vatn on building new institutional alternatives STEPS Centre seminar report: An Institutional Perspective on the Valuation of Biodiversity Biodiversity in an institutional setting favours social rationality and communicative action, said Professor Arild Vatn of the Agricultural University of Norway. But different deliberative procedures and the specifics of each ‘value articulating institution’ must be taken into account. And choosing procedures for defining which institutional setting is best in the specific case is the most challenging problem, but has attracted the least interest among practitioners in the field, said Vatn. He argued this choice depends partly on the character of the problem and partly on the more overall institutional characteristics of the involved society or societies. Vatn believes justice can only be given to this issue through a vibrant and open public sphere, creating the necessary self-reflecting capacity that makes a reasoned and open treatment of the second order problem possible. Several research agendas can be inspired by Vatn’s analysis, he said. First, there needs to be more research on the specific relationships between institutional structures and behaviour. We know far too little about the effects respective acceptance of specific elements of the procedure, like various ways of defining social roles, various ways of authorizing members of a deliberative process, various ways of securing accountability, said Vatn. Secondly, knowledge about how more technical procedures like multi-criteria analysis can be utilised to both foster the communicative process and secure accountability is needed. 'Personally, I think that developing such a procedure in a way that can support communication/deliberation instead of obstructing it is the most important and the most difficult,' said Vatn. 'At the present state of knowledge, the experiences are too varied to be able to draw any systematic conclusions. It is my firm belief that we must be willing to engage in much more systematic comparative studies concerning the above issues. They represent great challenges, but are the only way forward.' Related Links Find out more about SRI: http://ciifad.cornell.edu/sri
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Arild Vatn
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