Representing future generations in the deliberative valuation of ecosystem services

Even though decisions taken today about managing ecosystem services are likely to have an effect on future generations’ well-being, decision making is based largely on current generations’ values, including altruistic concern for posterity. Deliberative forms of citizen engagement can provide a methodological framework for incorporating sustainability considerations in the valuation task and for understanding the reasoning behind peoples’ choices. This paper uses a deliberative form of citizen engagement to better understand the temporal dimensions of social values by incorporating into the valuation task two plausible future scenarios and assigning to the participants the role of trustees for future generations. In particular, we employed the deliberative multicriteria evaluation (DMCE) method with eleven groups in which a total of 67 participants assessed the relative importance of ten ecosystem services in the Upper Merrimack River watershed in New Hampshire. Our results suggest that a deliberative form of citizen engagement provides the appropriate space for incorporating intergenerational concerns into decision making. Participants set environmental targets by prioritizing the satisfaction of basic human needs, securing human and environmental health, and avoiding the loss of ecosystem services that cannot be substituted and may lead to irreversible future losses. This finding suggests that when preferences are socially constructed, then ethical values underpin valuations, making it possible to integrate ecosystem service tradeoffs into environmental decisions in a manner that respects the environmental rights of future generations.