Conceptual representation of vertical subsumption and horizontal portability. Both models can be used to assess values and inform decisions that affect the people and places. Vertical subsumption is the common approach of top-down research and decision making, while horizontal portability is ideally facilitated by encounters between equals.
Figure designed by Alana McPherson: www.iamsci.com .

By Austin Himes, Barbara Muraca, Karen Allen, Mollie Chapman, Marcondes G. Coelho-Junior, Georgina Cundill, Rachelle Gould, Thora Herrmann, Jasper O. Kenter, ʻAlohi Nakachi, Gabriel R. Nemogá, Stefan Ortiz-Przychodzka, Jasmine Pearson, Betty Rono, Tomomi Saito, Marc Tadaki, and Aletta Bonn.

Read the full paper here.

International efforts to protect global biodiversity prominently feature the idea of relational values, but it isn’t always clear how understanding these values can improve policy and practices. In this paper, we suggest that the dominant way people study values, and use them to inform policy, limits the potential of relational values to help protect biodiversity and contribute to more just and sustainable futures.

Usually, values inform policy by the process of extracting people’s particular values of nature and translating them into abstract concepts which can strip away the importance of embodied and place-specific meanings people associate with the natural world. We refer to this as vertical subsumption. We suggest an alternative model called horizontal portability that is more suitable for preserving place-specific meanings that are central to many relational values. Horizontal portability describes encounters and communication between individuals or groups in which the individual’s (or group’s) values from specific, meaningful relationships with nature are shared with others, on equal terms, along with the important cultural and ecological contexts entwined with those values. In our broad conceptualization of horizontal portability, these encounters can fall on a spectrum from direct interactions between people or groups meeting in a physical place to mediated encounters separated in times and space, for example, where meaningful relationships with nature and the context of such relationships are shared through writing, recordings or art. Approaches in research about how people value nature that deeply engage with participants on equal terms and strive to allow their values to be expressed in their own language are well suited to facilitating horizontal portability.