Wellbeing, values, and planning in environmental management.

Concepts of 'human values' and 'wellbeing' are central in environmental planning, especially during the group deliberations that underpin expert and participatory processes. However, there are long-standing, unresolved controversies concerning both concepts with many debates being highly theoretical. Therefore, we suggest it is more productive to develop definitions and models that are task-specific (mid-level theory).

Classifying human wellbeing values for planning the conservation and use of natural resources.

Understanding how values interact is fundamental to planning the conservation and use of natural resources. However, practitioners who apply value classifications use a diversity of approaches. Does this matter? In answering this question, we propose that well-constructed classifications contribute to planning by: clarifying definitions and underlying concepts; providing a basis for assessing synergies and trade-offs; explaining some ethical constraints, including aspects of governance and power; and providing a framework for cross-cultural analysis.

Category mistakes: A barrier to effective environmental management.

How entities, the things that exist, are defined and categorised affects all aspects of environmental management including technical descriptions, quantitative analyses, participatory processes, planning, and decisions. Consequently, ambiguous definitions and wrongly assigning entities to categories, referred to as category mistakes, are barriers to effective management. Confusion caused by treating the term 'biodiversity' variously as the property of an area, the biota of an area, and a preferred end state (a value) - quite different categories of entities - is one example.

The contribution of nature to people: Applying concepts of values and properties to rate the management importance of natural elements.

An important, and yet unresolved question in natural resource management is how best to manage natural elements and their associated values to ensure human wellbeing. Specifically, there is a lack of measurement tools to assess the contribution of nature to people. We present one approach to overcome this global issue and show that the preferred state of any system element, in terms of realising human values, is a function of element properties.