Deliberative monetary valuation (DMV): Issues in combining economic and political processes to value environmental change

This paper explores and contrasts the different social processes of valuation nowappearing as
economic means of valuing the environment. Monetary valuation via stated preference
approaches has been criticised for assuming well formed and informed preferences and
excluding a range of sustainability concerns such as rights, fairness and equity. Deliberative
monetary valuation (DMV) in small groups is a novel hybrid of economic and political
approacheswhich raises the prospect of a transformative andmoralising experience. Critics of
standard contingent valuation approaches have advocated this as offering a way forward.
However there has been a lack of clarity as to the means of obtaining values, the expected
outcomes and their role. Moving to group settings of deliberation raises concepts of social
willingness to pay and accept which are distinct from an aggregate of individual value,
although this does not seemto have been widely recognised. A new classification of values is
presented appropriate to the literature trying to merge economic and political processes.
Values associated with the individualmay be exchange values, charitable contributions or fair
prices, while social values can be speculative, expressive or arbitrated. The use of DMV is
shown to result in different values due to variations in the institutional setting and process of
valuation.