The Relational Trend: Values, Knowledge and Worldviews Revisited

Values and knowledge are two important concepts in sustainability science. Recently, new framings for these concepts have been proposed, both of which place our social relationships at the centre of the discussions: one is the notion of relational values, the other one of relational cognition.

One assumption is that it is our values that shape our aspirations for the future and that determine what we regard to be “the good life” for us and for others. How could we talk about sustainable development goals, for instance, without first individually understanding what kind of world we want to live in? And how to get to a shared vision of a future world, if not by confronting and discussing our personal values? Do we think it important that everyone is able to secure their basic needs even when this means cutting down the local forest, or should the conservation goal be prioritized, regardless of the immediate effects on the community? Or is the answer, maybe, somewhere in between? It is only by bringing values to the surface that we can translate the ambiguous ambition of “sustainability” into practical, concrete actions.

Another assumption we often make is that knowledge critically influences our actions. The more we know about how the world works, the better we will become at achieving the outcomes we desire. If only we understood the causal chain between our driving to work every day and the “summer-less” July this year in Northern Europe! Then everyone would ride their bicycle everywhere, because – isn’t it so? – even people living at the 55^th parallel North enjoy sunbathing once in a while! Give people more information, get them to internalize it as knowledge, and they will change their behavior.

Of course, there is always at least some truth to be found in the claims above, but new research adds much more nuance to how we interpret them.

The concept of relational values is discussed in a PNAS opinion paper from last year by Chan et al. (2016). The authors make the point that sustainability and environmental literature has been dominated by the debates on whether nature should be seen as having intrinsic vs. instrumental value – this extends to the ecocentric vs. anthropocentric stances of the people in the debate, I would add. In contrast, relational values, they argue, allow us to frame concern for nature in more flexible ways, so that we are able to tie-in ideas about our identities, about our sense of place, or simply our human experiences and stories. In other words, if we might care about a forest, it may not be necessarily because of the pleasure we derive from walking there, nor because we think the forest is valuable in itself, but rather because of its position in our web of relationships, mediated by direct experiences, culture, and so on.

Similarly, the idea of relational cognition was brought up in a recent webinar by prof. Steve Rayner. He began his talk by emphasizing that the standard approach in policy making is to think that societal change is a problem of aggregation and coordination of individual behaviours. We tend to believe that, in order to achieve some desired collective outcome, all we need to do is to convince (and optimally coordinate) everyone to behave in a certain way. This could be done, for instance, by equipping them with the right knowledge, by tweaking their intentions via nudging, or by somehow shaping their deeply held values. But what if, he suggests, behaviors are not sourced within individuals’ hearts or minds, but rather emerge as properties of our social connections? What if what we do at any given moment is, in fact, a function of our context, broader environment and relations? This could also explain some of the behavioural inconsistencies that we all experience