eventual sale of their plots of trees. Section 5 discusses these results concerning monetary and
non-monetary dimensions of wood-lot and wood- land value, showing how the value attributed to
the forest needs to be understood in patrimonial perspective as a collective investment of meaning
as well as of time. Sections 6 and 7 conclude with discussions of methodological lessons for environ-
mental valuation in the context of socio-ecological economic sustainability concerns.
2. Valuation as a selection process amongst different prospects of ecological-economic
symbiosis
Our terrestrial habitats are not just raw materi- als sources and waste sinks, but veritable life-sup-
port systems that are invested with social and community significance, or meanings. So valua-
tion practices cannot be separated from the idea of actions whose effect is to sustain this or that
form of life, way of life — in the cultural as well as
ecological-economic sense
O’Connor, 1997a,b.
The view of sustainable development as a pro- cess based on cycles of renewal and regeneration,
a symbiosis of ecological and economic reproduc- tion, was already present in the concept of eco-de-
velopment expounded in the early 1970s by some international agencies, at first with reference
mainly to rural development projects in the Third World. At that time it joined a large array of
concepts and terminologies proposing an ‘alterna- tive’ development, whose common feature was
rejection of the dominant views of development couched in terms of rapid GNP-growth, through-
put of resources, and technological modernisa- tion. More specifically, as Ignacy Sachs 1980, p.
37 wrote:
Ecodevelopment is a development of peoples through themselves utilising to the best the
natural resources, adapting to an environment which they transform without destroying it. [....]
Development in its entirety has to be impreg- nated, motivated, underpinned by the research
of a dynamic equilibrium between the life pro- cess and the collective activities of human
groups planted in their particular place and time.
Emphasis here is on ‘the cultural contributions of the peoples concerned’ in the effort to ‘trans-
form the various elements of their environment into useful resources’ Sachs, 1984, pp. 28 – 30. In
effect, systems concepts from ecology, such as cycles and functional harmonisation, are trans-
posed to the social and organisational domain. In biophysical
terms eco-development
aims at
achieving a lasting symbiosis between humanity and the earth; at the social level the search is for
a harmonisation of relationships based on co-op- eration at local and international levels to achieve
economic equity.
In order to allow resource management deci- sions to be framed incisively we must add a
further dimension, that of conflict resolution or choices over sustaining what and for whom? The
VALSE project see O’Connor, 2000, this issue was about procedures and institutions for social
valuations of natural capital in environmental conservation and sustainability policy. The prob-
lem that has to be addressed is that a simple invocation of ‘symbiosis’ or ‘sustainability’ as a
reference concept does not serve as a decision criterion. It does not, for example, guarantee the
conservation of specified productive or reproduc- tive potentialities of any particular society or
ecosystem Nor does it assure the sustaining of all the particular interests, communities, or ecologies
thus given hope. So, by introducing the proble´ma- tique of ‘valuation’, we focus on the requirement
that human actions, and policy choices more par- ticularly, shall effect decisions about the ‘distribu-
tion of sustainability’: which interests and forms of life will be sustained, and which ones left
behind, relinquished, destroyed or left to die O’Connor and Martinez-Alier, 1997; cf. also Sa-
muels, 1992a,b on the ‘distribution of sacrifice’.
How might the various candidates for sustain- ability — for example, various terrestrial and
aquatic ecosystems
in ‘natural’
or human-
modified forms, agricultural systems, industrial, rural and urban communities in their physical
settings — be assessed in relation to each other?
We are forced to acknowledge incommensurabili- ties Martinez-Alier et al., 1999. In a typical
watershed management situation the maintenance of say bird populations and riverbank rural
economies through flood management assuring year-round flows, would serve different communi-
ties of interest from say damming and piping the water for urban supply.
From a decisionmaking and policy assessment point of view there are both advantages and dis-
advantages of sacrificing the ideal of full commen- surability of valuations. The VALSE project has
emphasised deliberation and decisionmaking pro- cedures that typically will not yield a unique
ranking of options, but that make more explicit the reasons for and against the different sorts of
social choices and ecological and economic trade- offs that might be involved. While this ‘discursive’
approach may seem to imply greater complexity in the way of framing decision problems, an ad-
vantage from a scientific and, for some, from an ethical and aesthetic point of view is the richer
appreciation of the significance to different com- munities of interest of the choices to be made.
The French VALSE case study concerned small forest pockets in agricultural France, in the Gaˆti-
nais region some 100 kilometres south of Paris. There are many small such forest islands ıˆlots
boise´s, which have been the object of several recent studies carried out by several different re-
search teams looking at various ecological, eco- nomic and social dimensions. From 1992 to 1996,
these wooded ‘oases’ were the object of a multi- disciplinary study carried out by a research team
from the Muse´um National d’Histoire Naturelle on ‘The future of woodland areas in large agricul-
tural plains: the example of north-west Gaˆtinais’ Blandin, 1996; Blandin and Arnould, 1996;
Girard and Baize, 1996. The wooded ‘islands’ were studied essentially in view of their marked
isolation compared to two ‘source-continents’ rep- resented by the forest massifs of Fontainebleau
and Orle´ans Linglard, 1992, 2000.
The largest of the woods studied is the Bois de Bouchereau, around 48 hectares, on which a num-
ber of natural inventories were made phyto-eco- logical surveys, transections, pedological ditches,
study of fauna, etc. as well as legal and economic studies see Dubien, 1993; de la Gorce, 1994;
Heron, 1997; Noe¨l and Tsang King Sang, 1997. This woodland is situated in open field country
called the ‘Gaˆtinais Nord-Occidental’, about 100 km to the south-west of Paris. It is composed of
‘parcels’ held as private property. The woodland has been, through generations, progressively di-
vided into about 284 wood-lots in French, par- celles actually owned by about 155 persons.
As Norgaard suggests in his coevolutionary development perspective Norgaard, 1988, 1994,
questions of ecological-economic symbiosis and co-evolution can be considered along several dif-
ferent spatial, as well as temporal scales — from a specific ‘local’ communities and territories,
through nation states, regions and trade blocs, to the global level. At each scale, one can consider
the community or system for itself, and also its exchanges and co-evolution with other systems
and communities, asking:
‘Will the resource base, environment, technolo- gies and culture evolve over time in a mutually
reinforcing manner?.... Will [the resource users] destroy the local resource base and environ-
ment or, just as bad, the local people and their cultural system?’ Norgaard, 1988, op. cit., p.
607.
These characterisations address the sustainabil- ity of the interactions between people and their
environments over time. They refer to ‘the sus- tainability of the interactions between regions and
cultural systems’ ibid., that is, to exchange and reciprocal transformation as a cultural as well as
material process. A co-evolution, if it occurs, is a biophysical symbiosis, but it is not simply the
biophysical
coexistence. Purposefulness
and meaning are located on the symbolic planes as
much as the biophysical planes. This raises ques- tions such as: in what ways does a person feel part
of a community, in what ways do their choices and actions depend on their sense of being part of
a community?
Our Bouchereau woodland does not have ex- ceptional characteristics in the fields of flora and
wildlife. Nor is it endangered by any motorway development or other threat. No major conflict
about the uses of the wood has appeared until now; the different uses as wood cutting, walking,
hunting, daffodils gathering, and so on, coexist seasonally or all year long without a major prob-
lem. On the face of it, there is not a problem of defending an environmental value under immedi-
ate threat. So, the valuation question is a straight- forward one of understanding what sorts of
significance are attached to the forest by the local communities, whether or not this is sufficient to
ensure that it will sustained and, if so, in what form?
3. Investigating the relationship between community viability and forest value
