This book considers the concept of ‘value’ at the root of our actions and decision-making. Value is an ever-present, yet little interrogated aspect of everyday life. This book explores value as it is theorised, practiced and critiqued from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.
It examines how value is operationalized, endorsed and contested in contemporary society. With international insights from leading scholars, chapters offer a diverse and vibrant geographical engagement with value to showcase its conceptual flexibility. The book explores value’s eclectic epistemic foundations; it’s ‘roll-out’ and legitimation across a range of policy fields; and its challenges and opportunities. The book draws on global examples of value in practice: from forest conservation in Indonesia; protected area management in arctic Norway; a state park in the US; certification schemes for biodiversity in the UK; protection of the international night sky; heritage planning in East Taiwan; a re-developed airport site in Norway; a, local food networks in Canada and the UK; a market in the US and urban development in China.
The book will be of interest to human geographers, political ecologists, heritage scholars and practitioners, planners and those working in public policy, as well as practitioners and policy makers interested in how valuation processes work.
This book considers value as it is theorised, practiced, and critiqued from varied disciplinary perspectives. Value’s growing currency within social, cultural, and environmental policy is the latest manifestation of a long running faith in this concept.
List of Figures; List of Tables; Preface; Acknowledgments; Notes on
Contributors;
1. Locating Value: An Introduction; Part I: Knowing Value
2.
Spectral geometries: value sub specie spatii and sensuous supersensibility;
3. Locating heritage value;
4. Making values visible and real, but not
necessarily monetised;
5. "Theres no such thing as a unit of biodiversity":
contesting value and biodiversity offsetting in England;
6. Commensuration as
value making: transforming nature in English biodiversity offsetting under
the DEFRA metric; Part II: Spacing Value
7. Regimes of value in a Chicago
market;
8. Urban planning practice and the transformation of value in China:
Evidence from the city of Yangzhou;
9. Locating value in the Anthropocene:
baselines and the contested nature of invasive plants;
10. "And what do you
do with five-hundred million stars?" Assessment of darkness and the starry
sky, values and integration in regional planning;
11. Value and diminishment:
Listing State Park closures, the 2011 attempt to meet General Fund reductions
in California; Part III: Practicing Value
12. Unsettled value: re-identifying
tobacco agriculture as heritage in eastern Taiwan;
13. Locating value(s) in
political ecologies of knowledge: The East Svalbard management plan;
14.
Locating value in food value chains;
15. Private finance evaluation amongst
REDD+ projects in Indonesia; Index
Sam Saville is currently an ESRC postdoctoral research fellow in Human geography at Aberystwyth University and is extending her doctoral work on value and environmental politics in Svalbard. Her research and publications span interests in polar geography, political ecology, climate change and rural globalization.
Gareth Hoskins is senior lecturer in Geography at Aberystwyth University where he teaches on a variety of topics including urban geography, the politics of memory, heritage, and material culture. His publications involve case studies in the United States, United Kingdom and South Africa.
