Exploring the relationship between plural values of nature, human well-being, and conservation and development intervention: Why it matters and how to do it?

1. Globally, land and seascapes across the bioculturally diverse tropics are in transition. Impacted by the demands of distant consumers, the processes of global environmental change and numerous interventions seeking climate, conservation and development goals, these transitions have the potential to impact the relationships and plurality of values held between people and place. 2. This paper is a Synthesis of seven empirical studies within the Special Feature (SF): ‘What is lost in transition? Capturing the impacts of conservation and development interventions on relational values and human wellbeing in the tropics’. Through two Open Forum workshops, and critical review, contributing authors explored emergent properties across the papers of the SF. Six core themes were identified and are subsumed within broad categories of: (i) the problem of rec-onciling scale and complexity

The ultimate drivers of landscape transitions and environmental decline in the tropics are the demand for commodities in more affluent countries combined with the outsourcing of destructive components of production chains to areas with lower environmental regulations (Carmenta et al., 2023;Liu et al., 2013).Despite the dominance of distant drivers many interventions focus at the sitelevel in areas of high biological and cultural diversity (Carmenta et al., 2023).Interventions often seek climate, conservation or development goals aiming to mitigate climatic and ecological damages, restore past losses or deliver to human needs (Adams et al., 2004;Convention on Biological Diversity, 2022;Mansourian et al., 2017;Otero et al., 2020;Reed, Oldekop, et al., 2020).Climate, conservation and development intervention targets such as 30 by 30 indicate the intended doubling-up of such site-level efforts (Convention on Biological Diversity, 2022; Dinerstein et al., 2017;Waldron et al., 2020;Wilson, 2016).
Crucially, the processes of global environmental change and the interventions developed in response to it, present a combined potential to impact the various relationships held between people and place.These relationships contribute in multiple ways to diverse conceptions of human well-being, or living well.This diversity in the types of values derived from nature, and the way they are prioritized and salient to (equally diverse) conceptions of human well-being, is referred to as plural values.The various contributions of nature to human well-being are most apparent for Indigenous Peoples and local communities living closest to nature in landscapes now often threatened by external drivers of change and targeted by conservation and development interventions (Erbaugh & Oldekop, 2018;Reed, Oldekop, et al., 2020;Tauli-Corpuz et al., 2020).
Indigenous Peoples, and non-indigenous local communities throughout the biodiverse tropics tend to practice small-scale low-input swidden agriculture combined with fishing, forest extraction and sale of surplus to local markets (Brondízio et al., 2021;Lima et al., 2020;Maffi & Woodley, 2012;Reyes-García et al., 2022).
Indigenous Peoples and local communities (IP&LCs) inhabit cultures, life-frames, values and management practices that have evolved over considerable timescales and have proven consonant with nature (Kenter & O'Connor, 2022;Maffi, 2018).It is now established that IP&LCs have demonstrably less impact on nature than capitalized and neoliberalized stakeholder groups (Dawson et al., 2021;Garnett et al., 2018;IPBES, 2019).Their values and knowledge systems are increasingly highlighted in both science and policy as critical for their contribution to environmental governance and climate resilience (Brondizio & Tourneau, 2016;Convention on Biological Diversity, 2022;Corrigan et al., 2018;Franks, 2021;IPBES, 2022;Reyes-García et al., 2022).
Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities are distinct groups (reflected in our use of the ampersand) and are often some of the most vulnerable and politically, economically and epistemically marginalized peoples (Garnett et al., 2018;Newton et al., 2020).Local communities include those of mixed descent, that emerged following the detribalization of native populations, and that draw heavily on indigenous lifeways (Adams et al., 2008).Despite their contribution to conservation, the salience of non-material and relational values in these contexts, and the growing threats that IP&LCs face it remains the case that interventions and impact assessments generally omit the non-material constituents of peoples' lives and relationships with place (Gould et al., 2015;McKinnon et al., 2016;Oldekop et al., 2020).
Efforts to improve impact evaluation to enable evidence-based interventions (called for by e.g.Baylis et al., 2016;Ferraro & Pattanayak, 2006;Schleicher et al., 2020;Sutherland et al., 2004) have tended to focus on the tangible, material and quantitative aspects.For example, measuring agricultural yields (Duru et al., 2015;Landis, 2017;Sukhdev, 2018) or ecological outcomes (e.g.hectares deforested, carbon emitted; e.g.Coad et al., 2015;Coetzee et al., 2014;Geldmann et al., 2018Geldmann et al., , 2019;;Guizar-Coutiño et al., 2022).Although there is a growing recognition of human dimensions in environmental change and governance (de Lange et al., 2016;IPBES, 2022;Woodhouse et al., 2015), facilitated by the ecosystem services concept that highlighted the cultural services of nature, the emphasis has still primarily been on instrumental achieving more just and sustainable futures, and highlights some of the key actions points deemed necessary to achieve such a transition to conventional practice.
services (Chan, Satterfield, et al., 2012).Even when human dimensions are considered, the focus remains on the tangible contributions of nature to material well-being (IPBES, 2022;McKinnon et al., 2016).Furthermore, ecosystem service and well-being impact assessments tend to be dominated by externally derived criteria that may not align with local priorities (Esteves et al., 2012;Klain et al., 2014;Sterling et al., 2020).Locally relevant, place-based notions of the plural values contributing to well-being have been largely overlooked (Coulthard et al., 2018;Dacks et al., 2019;McGregor, Camfield, et al., 2015;Nussbaum, 2007).
Expanding the often narrow framing of human well-being in conservation, climate and development impact evaluation could benefit both people and nature.Such extension must capture the plurality of values that people hold for place (and that contribute to placebased well-being) (Agarwala et al., 2014).A suite of approaches for doing so is available (Carmenta et al., 2022;Cundill et al., 2017;Forster et al., 2022;McKinnon et al., 2016;Rasmussen et al., 2018) yet has remained largely absent from routine impact evaluation (Pascual et al., 2023).The IPBES global values assessment provided important insights into approaches to capturing the diverse values of nature and called for their integration into decision-making and policymaking (IPBES, 2022).One area of particular attention is the relational values concept-a non-material, non-instrumental value that captures the relations people hold for nature, and reflect the people-people interactions enabled through embedment in nature (Chan et al., 2016(Chan et al., , 2018;;Pascual et al., 2023).
In addition, a considerable body of work highlights the important contribution of non-material values to well-being (e.g.McGregor, Coulthard, et al., 2015;Russell et al., 2013).These include for example, emotional connections to places, identities rooted in place, and cultural interactions enabled by place (Chan et al., 2016;Daniel et al., 2012;Fish et al., 2016;Inglis & Pascual, 2021).The predominant invisibility of relational and subjective dimensions in conventional impact assessment is problematic, as it obstructs a relevant, equitable and decolonial understanding of localized intervention impacts (Fischer, 2014).This invisibility is significant because metrics shape desired outcomes and 'what gets measured, gets managed' (Jacobs et al., 2018).The tendency to overlook non-material values hampers the integration of these well-being constituents, including relationships with and interpretations of nature, into project goals (Schleicher, Schaafsma, et al., 2017;Thiry et al., 2018).
Enhancing impact assessment is crucial because knowledge systems, values, and place-based relationships are marginalized and disappearing.Without recognizing these values, climate, conservation and development efforts may inadvertently contribute to this attrition (Carmenta et al., 2023).Moreover, interventions cannot support community recovery from environmental harms, including risk and disaster, without reflecting locally held values (Carmenta et al, forthcoming).Lastly, the omission of relational values hinders a comprehensive understanding of the values inherent in the institutions of IP&LCs.Yet, these institutions provide evidence-based sustainable alternatives to more neoliberal forms of governance that emphasize instrumental values and ultimately segregate people and nature in favour of extraction and protection (Adams et al., 2004;Brondízio et al., 2021;Otero et al., 2020).
The urgency of redefining what gets measured when assessing the social impacts of landscape transitions, be they incurred through global environmental change or interventions in response to it, is further signified by the growing calls for environmental justice (Coolsaet, 2020;Dawson et al., 2018;Martin et al., 2013).The concept of environmental justice seeks greater consideration of different worldviews and values in conservation (Diaz et al., 2015;IPBES, 2022;Obura et al., 2022;Pascual et al., 2021), and to decolonize conservation practice and science (Aini & West, 2018;Baker et al., 2019;Domínguez & Luoma, 2020;Kothari, 2021;Krauss, 2021;Lele et al., 2010;Mabele et al., 2023).What gets measured and how has important implications regarding whose voices are included in relevant policy fora and processes (e.g.Lundquist et al., 2015).Extending conventional impact evaluation to plural valuation processes has potential to inform equitable intervention strategies because it affords due recognition of the place-based plurality of values that are impacted through climate, conservation and development interventions (Jacobs et al., 2018;Pascual et al., 2021;Zafra-Calvo et al., 2020).(Carmenta et al. and Llopis et al, this issue); consequences and implications of value divergence between conservation practitioners and IP&LCs (Dawson et al; Yuliani et al; Betley et al, this issue); the role of values in intervention framing and subsequent motivational crowding (Lliso et al, this issue); and the expression and consideration of non-environmental relational values (Hoelle et al, this issue).This Synthesis paper accompanies the collection and replaces the more standard Guest Editorial.Rather than present the papers alone, this Synthesis was collaboratively developed after all contributing authors had critically reviewed one-another's contributions and participated in 'Open Forum' workshops.Together, we explored emergent properties across the papers, catalogued the methods used for plural valuation, and reflected on some of the research and practice implications that became evident in this process.Here, we discuss the six cross-cutting themes that emerged.Such insights are necessary for dialogue, transparency and to move towards social and environmental justice in the appraisal of global environmental change and design of associated interventions.The approaches used in this Special Feature demonstrate the possibility of new foundations to social impact assessment when considering climate, conservation and development interventions.Notably, they speak to expanding impact metrics towards a more grounded, relational and inclusive approach.

| ME THODS
We held two 4-h virtual 'Open Forum' workshops, in September and October (2020).Workshop participants were co-authors of the seven papers in the Special Feature (n 23) (Figure 1), and three additional experts in the field.Participants were associated with various cultural and geographic backgrounds and represented a spectrum of disciplinary insights, spanning the natural and social sciences (e.g.anthropology, conservation social science, ecology, ecological economics, human geography, land systems science, political ecology and political economy) and were based in institutions around the world (including Brazil, EU, India, Indonesia, Mexico and the UK; Table S1).Prior to the workshops, all participants read drafts of all papers contributing to this Special Feature and were asked to highlight the challenges, advances, key messages and emergent concepts visible across them.
During the workshop, participants first shared their feedback in small break-out groups.These discussions were followed by an extended plenary session which applied the Open Forum method and followed Chatham House rules (Mindell, 2002).The Open Forum method generates discussion guided by metaphorical 'doors' which represent particular topics.Doors are considered 'entry points' through which participants can declare the intended theme associated with each of their interjections.The initial doors were defined by the Guest Editors (Carmenta and Zaeringher) and were based on a first reading of the individual manuscripts.Doors were different between the first (challenges, future and methods) and the second (justice, governance, participation and pathways to change) workshop.Each Open Forum session hosted an additional, untitled door, through which new concepts and themes could be introduced by the participants.The workshops were led by an independent facilitator and were recorded (through audio recording, and note keeping).A process of thematic consolidation of workshop recordings identified six core themes which organize the following sections.

| RE SULTS AND D ISCUSS I ON
We identified six emergent themes broadly characterized as those considering the cross-cutting methodological challenge of scale in relation to extending impact metrics in more plural appraisals (3.1), and those that identify key action points that would help address some of the barriers to mainstreaming plural valuation (3.2.1-3.2.4), F I G U R E 1 Geographic location, aims and methods applied for the seven empirical studies in the Special Feature.and finally the promise of an environmental justice framework to encourage more just and plural approaches to climate, conservation and development intervention (3.3).We finish with an overview of the methods used (3.4) within the papers and that may be useful to researchers and practitioners keen to pursue plural valuation.
Because our interest was in identifying emergent themes across the full collection of contributing papers within the Special Feature, it was not always possible to map each theme back to individual contributing papers.However, we indicate where specific references illustrate a particular point well, and combine the presentation of themes with consultation of the broader literature.

| Key methodological challenges: Identifying the sweet-spot
One of the six themes that emerged from the collection and workshops concerned a key methodological challenge and relates to the long-standing and lingering trade-off between nuance (e.g.context specificity) and scalability (or generalizability; Chan, Guerry, et al., 2012;Satz et al., 2013).Given that the methods and metrics used by researchers will inevitably condition the types of outcomes and conclusions that are both sought and reached (Jacobs et al., 2018;Termansen et al., 2022), finding a way to make visible the diverse values at stake and to reconcile different approaches to assessment is crucial.A key methodological challenge that researchers face concerns the difficult trade-offs in their attempts to locate the 'sweet-spot' between contrasting, and at times opposing, goals, methods and scales of analysis (White & Blackmore, 2016).As Betley et al (this issue) outline, one of the biggest challenges concerns finding the appropriate balance between translating the nuance and specificity of the lived experience of global change and its interventions in ways that can be understood by policymakers, and measured by indicators that are scalable and comparable.The degree to which this is possible, and where the most suitable 'sweet-spot' may lie is itself a pressing research question, and one not answered by the collection in this Special Feature.Emphasis on how local microprocesses scale-up, how macro-processes scale down, and how local social-ecological systems interact with each other, by focussing on interactions across scales, allows to navigate the tensions between nuance and scalability (Balvanera et al., 2017).Similarly, the scholarly debate on cultural ecosystem services has been reckoning with defining the appropriate scale of assessment for some time (Chan, Guerry, et al., 2012;Satz et al., 2013).This body of work has demonstrated the importance of eliciting values from a wide range of stakeholders in a particular place to fully conceptualize the relevant links between people and place critical to well-being (Klain et al., 2014) and proposed relevant protocols and frameworks for assessing these values (Breslow et al., 2016;Chan, Guerry, et al., 2012;Klain et al., 2014).These localized framings of well-being present challenges related to their comparability and how they can be integrated into broader scales for decision-making, planning and management (Chan, Guerry, et al., 2012;Turner et al., 2008).
A related issue, reiterated time and again across the papers, and the workshops, was that relying on the broad-brush of conventional, often standardized approaches, risks obfuscating placebased realities.This tendency is criticized for ignoring the hidden costs of global environmental change (and associated interventions) on non-material dimensions of well-being (e.g.farmer's psychological stress, lost rights; Büscher & Fletcher, 2019).Inattention to local life-frames, place attachments, identities, livelihoods, relationships and notions and aspirations of 'alternative' developments all pose considerable issues.At worst, this can mean failing to document harms incurred (e.g. when harms are in relational dimensions) (Carmenta et al, this issue), or failing to understand what people care about when introducing interventions and thereby impacting long-standing motivations (Lliso et al, this issue).On the contrary, attempts to explore the full nuance of place-based values and find metrics using bottom-up approaches can pose its own set of challenges, such as issues of broader comparability, theoretical, conceptual and disciplinary consistency, or relevance to decision-makers.
An aversion to the 'fuzzy' variables that are intangible and difficult to measure in clearly bounded terms is persistent and problematic (see Section 3.2.1 below).It impairs justice in impact appraisal and propagates the dominance of material metrics in pursuit of 'development' (Pascual et al., 2023).Diving into the nuances of contrasting sites, and synthesizing insights beyond the need of shared methods and indicators, to identification of key principles can advance the recognition of relational values in impact assessments (Balvanera et al., 2017).
(In)commensurability was another key problem to confront.
Concepts such as 'Total Economic Value' (OECD, 2006) or 'Inclusive Wealth' (Dasgupta, 2021) and Payments for Ecosystem Services are influential in policy circles due to their proposed ability to subsume multiple types of value within a single metric yet so far single metric approaches have tended to emphasize the instrumental values of nature over its non-instrumental contributions (O'Connor & Kenter, 2019).As such, they have received considerable criticism (e.g.Admiraal et al., 2013).For example, ignoring issues of incommensurability between different types of values, can lead to idealized yet over-simplified typologies of trade-offs (e.g. economy vs. environment), which obscure alternative combinations (e.g. economy vs. relational values; Isacs et al., 2022), or for their inadequacy in measuring the subtler ways in which people consider nature valuable, including its intrinsic and relational worth (Pascual et al., 2017).The growing recognition of the diverse ways in which nature is important to human well-being and the pace at which landscapes are in transition has led to calls for more plural approaches to valuation, as well as more critical reflection on the implications and limitations of using different methods (Jacobs et al., 2018;Reid & Rout, 2020).

The papers in this Special
However an ever-expanding valuation toolkit poses challenges of its own, such as how to compare and integrate results from disciplinary traditions with different epistemological foundations and practices of legitimacy (Sandbrook et al., 2022), in addition to differences in the temporal and spatial scales under study.In the sections that follow, we identify some of the challenges that must be addressed in order to embed plurality in impact appraisal.

| Future pathways: Action points for researching and implementing plurality in appraisal
Here, we outline four (of the six) themes that we identified and that together broadly represent action points needed to overcome the central challenges to bringing plurality into practice in pursuit of more just and sustainable futures in landscapes of transition.

| Engage plurality to disarm hegemony
The over-emphasis of material and instrumental values of nature in site-level interventions reflects the dominant social, institutional and ideological hegemony centred in the neoliberalism of industrialized societies.Neoliberalism maintains a social and moral order exclusively centred on individual consumerism disconnected from the community, and the rupture of relations with the State, the union, and communality (Gare, 2017).This hegemony feeds a homo economicus mentality, ignoring, invalidating and delegitimizing the non-material and among these, the relational values that contribute to determining human behaviour, decision-making and well-being.
By drawing on the plurality of values and holistic life-frames of living with, from, in and as nature, conservation action could embed and reflect ethics of responsibility, reciprocity and care and trend towards more just and inclusive futures (Díaz, Settele, Brondízio, Ngo, Agard, et al., 2019;Díaz, Settele, Brondízio, Ngo, Guèze, et al., 2019;IPBES, 2022;Kothari, 2021;Pascual et al., 2021;Zafra-Calvo et al., 2020).External interventions in tropical land-and seascapes therefore need to build on, strengthen, revitalize and empower those people-nature relationships that are plural and that tend to persist in those places so often the target of interventions (Carmenta et al., 2023).Such a focus would derail the further homogenization of diverse values, which we see in practice through intervention strategies (Adams et al., 2004;Otero et al., 2020) and biased impact metrics (McKinnon et al., 2016).
The contributions in this Special Feature highlight cases of contemporary biocultural diversity and emphasize the importance of the local knowledge, place-based human well-being (and associated values) and the worldviews of IP&LCs as the source of diverse ways of life (Maffi, 2018).These various ways of living and being in the world shelter the existing alternatives in the shadow of the prevailing models (Kothari et al., 2019), and are defiant against derogatory labels routinely ascribed to smallholders which include 'backward', 'informal' or 'irregular' (Leach et al., 2021).Biocultural frameworks in synergy with frameworks that capture multidimensional well-being and relational values may respond to the ethical imperative to recognize diverse ways of life and contribute to the participatory creation of alternative developments (Guibrunet et al., 2021;Merçon et al., 2019;Rozzi, 2013;Sterling et al., 2020).However, conventional ideas of development and people nature relationships are still most represented in international conservation organizations (Otero et al., 2020) and national agendas (Reed, Oldekop, et al., 2020).

| Acknowledge path-dependencies
The international conservation community must do more to recognize customary institutions of IP&LCs as legitimate and effective forms of governance and push for shifts in values.For example, the implementation of conservation projects on the ground through international NGOs can override customary tenure regimes and involve widespread human rights violations and contravene the social standards that they have signed up to and claim to uphold (Boyd & Keene, 2021).Global agendas, such as the Agenda 2030 and the SDGs, have been largely interpreted as trajectories towards sustainability that are rooted in (green) growth and largely based on instrumental values.These views appear steeped in the dominant assumption that economic growth underscores what it means to 'live well'.To make future interventions more inclusive and fair, they must include local and regional perspectives, place-based values and solicit local visions of development (Martin et al., 2022;Pereira et al., 2018;Wyborn et al., 2020).
The potential of grounded alternative future visions is clear in the diversity of frameworks and movements that have inspired people to take action and generate practices towards transformation (e.g.Kothari et al., 2019), many of which emphasize relational values to support actions (IPBES, 2022).For example, the Earth Stewardship of the Ecological Society of America (Power & Chapin, 2010), the degrowth movement (Kallis et al., 2018), and the well-being economy alliance (WE-All) (Costanza et al., 2018).In these scenarios, relational and non-instrumental values gain legitimacy and acknowledgement, indeed are regarded as imperative to the sustainability of peoplenature relationships.

| Strengthen transdisciplinary research partnerships
To enable a transition towards more just futures in tropical landand seascapes, the commitment of conservation science, practitioners and stewards, must be focussed on sowing seeds that reclaim, recover and revitalize connection to nature, through multiple values of nature, and the relations that are enabled through nature.Recognition of the relational values embedded in multidimensional well-being frameworks can help to strengthen the legitimacy of the links between diverse actors, their knowledge and their experiences with nature (Russell et al., 2013).Academia and scientists can thereby have critical input in supporting change, through the way they produce, recognize and incorporate knowledges and values (Cash et al., 2003;Chambers et al., 2021;Clark et al., 2016;Lubchenco & Rapley, 2020;Norström et al., 2020;Zurba et al., 2022).In this way, scientists can become transformative agents.This practice partly involves the recovery of the sense of community in the experience of the co-construction of knowledge.In science, individual practice and institutional function can be transformed through collaborative work strategies and collective leadership (Care et al., 2021).Jacobs et al. (2020) propose the metaphor of 'octupy', where the power of the scientist in academia is critically used to do good.This metaphor arises in line with the creation of community and the transition to an ecological civilization that allows community interactions, where communities increase favourable conditions for the life of other communities (Gare, 2017).
Moving towards a just and sustainable future requires a methodological transformation that accompanies these changes.
Transdisciplinarity is shown as the practice that allows this integration (Hirsch Hadorn et al., 2006).However, the majority of scientific knowledge produced on nature-people relations in the tropics is still conceptualized and driven by global North research agendas.A shift towards more equitable research partnerships between academic institutions in the Global North and South, and the various non-academic stakeholders connected to the conservation and development issues at hand, is necessary to enable collaboration across plural knowledge systems and unpack the full potential of transdisciplinary research (Mabele et al., 2023).Additionally, interdisciplinary collaboration around questions of resource use valuation and well-being is often still stifled due to the difficulty of finding a common understanding between, for example economists, social scientists and those with a background in the natural sciences (Satterfield et al., 2013).Enabling a transdisciplinary shift will require a change to research funder's strategies, which currently evaluate proposals according to criteria of scientific excellence and fast impact, while neglecting that inter-and transdisciplinary research needs more time, reflection, humility and resources (Reed, Ickowitz, et al., 2020;Roesch-McNally et al., 2020).Advocates of plural valuation often point to the potential of deliberation and stakeholder engagement to act as the vehicles capable of bridging different types of values, knowledge's and worldviews (Kenter, 2016;Lliso et al., 2022;Zafra-Calvo et al., 2020).
Carefully executed inter-and transdisciplinary research processes and knowledge co-production can lead to social learning, build understanding and trust, bring legitimacy to 'fringe' values, and facilitate conflict resolution (IPBES, 2022;Pascual et al., 2017;Schneider et al., 2019;Wyborn et al., 2019).But these community-engaged approaches also come with their own challenges, such as the increase in resources required (e.g.financial, coordination, technical, time and training) compared to more conventional disciplinary and rapid appraisal approaches.They can also create and necessitate levels of reflexivity and self-reflection that can be uncomfortable to members of the research team, as they require questioning particular power dynamics and knowledge-power assumptions.They often demand training across methods and theoretical approaches, the interdisciplinary nature of which is still not fully endorsed within tertiary learning curricula (Hajer et al., 2015;Kelemen et al., 2022).This tension may hinder or impose limits on the feasibility of more plural methods and approaches in certain contexts (Schneider et al., 2022).

| The promise of environmental justice
The sixth emergent theme from the Special Feature and workshops concerned environmental justice.Specifically, the promise of the environmental justice framework to illustrate the distribution of impacts and thereby help steer-away from the 'invisible' harms associated with environmental change and its interventions (Martin et al., 2013).Here, we outline how the three interrelated dimensions of environmental justice: recognition; procedure and distribution (Coolsaet, 2020;Schlosberg, 2004) can and have been useful to the studies in the Special Feature and beyond.The framework allows us to pay specific attention to the perspectives of IP&LCs, whose values, practices and governance institutions so often diverge from the prevailing logics, ways of thinking and the values and strategies of external actors designing and implementing interventions (Hoekema, 2017;IPBES, 2022).
Recognition is a core strand of interest to environmental justice, and also one that plural valuation addresses centrally.Recognition injustice is driven by discursive power that shapes and reproduces discourses, knowledges, and hierarchies regarding the values of nature.
These power dimensions influence all societal interactions including actors' capacities to pursue their interests and values.As discussed above, climate, conservation and development interventions in the tropics have not fully recognized (accounted for or 'made visible') the different world views and values held by IP&LC in their conceptualization, design or evaluation (Balvanera et al., 2022;Guibrunet et al., 2021).Bringing visibility, or recognition to these plural values and views is necessarily addressed through an environmental justice framework.Due recognition then compliments the need to overcome hegemony (see Section 3.2.1),and can help counter the prevalence of material metrics and outcomes which continue to be a key strategy and focus of many interventions (Otero et al., 2020).A focus on the material metrics can undermine traditional knowledge, social relations or non-material values and result in rejection of the intervention (Yuliani et al, this issue;Blom et al., 2010).Further, without recognizing all value domains the trade-offs that interventions may introduce such as material gains at the cost of relational harms, can go un-noticed (e.g.Carmenta et al; Llopis et al, this issue).
The procedural dimension is also relevant, since better proce- tions (e.g. the design and operationalization) is becoming more common, it is not always adequately achieved (i.e. in ways that capture the visions and needs of IP&LCs) and can be heavily influenced by power imbalances between proponents and residents (Dawson et al., Yuliani et al., this issue).
Procedural justice serves to counter the risk of reconfiguring decision-making structures away from local, customary institutions towards more formal and externally controlled processes (Fatem et al., 2018;Martin et al., 2013;Peluso & Lund, 2013).Evidence is emerging to support such change, including studies in this Special which can result in negative impacts and injustices (Carmenta et al, and Llopis et al, this issue;Wieland et al., 2016).The distribution of benefits and burdens is central in understanding the justice dimension of global environmental change and its drivers.All too often the drivers of environmental harm create benefits to those actors that are detached from the harms induced by landscape change (Lapola et al., 2023).Thus at a broader level, environmental justice allows us to question the strong focus on changing actors' behaviour at the local, site-level, in much conservation intervention.Given the driver of environmental harm and climate change is disproportionately related to the actions of wealthy actors, there is a need for a radical, system level change in conservation and development practice (Díaz, Settele, Brondízio, Ngo, Agard, et al., 2019;Díaz, Settele, Brondízio, Ngo, Guèze, et al., 2019), as well as for deep reflection by science itself (Pascual et al., 2017).Such transformation requires TA B L E 1 Abbreviated methods and approaches used to understand, quantify and evaluate human well-being and relational values, as employed by studies featured in this Special Feature.

Method Benefits/advantages
Global person generated index (GPGI), Semistructured interview Open-ended emic approach allows for local conceptions of well-being to find voice and be understood.The standardized structure of the instrument allows for some systematization of the data and subsequent analysis Landscape walks and multi-stakeholder workshops, and semi-structured interview Flexible to local values and priorities and so respondent-led, but some element of standardization of topic and quantification of more objective aspects of well-being Participant-observation Offers in-depth view in which understanding unfolds through normal events in daily life, rather than through deductive or structured methods that may foreclose on such understanding.Lends itself to description and depth of understanding, and specificity Lab-in-the-field experimental game.Modified 'dictator game': the forest management game Simulating complex real-world situations in a controlled experimental setting can provide key insights when designing policy by allowing researchers to isolate the effect of specific policy design choices Structured interviews 1.Data collected through this method are readily amenable for quantitative analysis.
2. The flexibility the method provides for systematizing data collection in a qualitative, conversational manner while also leaving room for getting deeper into certain aspects relevant for the research questions.
Focus group discussion and participatory workshops 1.The method allowed for systematically eliciting as many locally relevant WB components as possible 2. The method allows local participants and researchers to seek depth in questions and answers.3. Powerful method to 'quickly' get an idea of what is going on in the village, and can serve as an exploratory step to support further, deeper data collection steps.4. It can serve to generate rapport and trust between local populations and the research team at the start of working with a given community.

Semi-structured interview, a 'conversation with a purpose' technique
The technique gathers a full picture of the interconnectedness among different elements of the issues being investigated.It also fosters a relaxed environment and trust, in which respondents can tell stories rather than answer structured questions Appreciative Inquiry approach, focus group discussion, and semi-structured interview and AI helps build the confidence of participants to express their opinion, and to come with more balanced perceptions than focusing too much on the negative

Life history technique and semi-structured interview
Useful to investigate what happened in the past and to establish time reference (combined with line calendar) Land use/land cover analysis.
Useful to triangulate the qualitative information from respondents, and to get more quantitative information endorsement of a counter-narrative that would reframe the rationale and strategies underpinning conservation and development towards empowerment of, and stewardship by IP&LCs based on their own values, institutions and practices (Artelle et al., 2019;Garnett et al., 2018;Walker et al., 2014).
Conservation and development research has an important role to play in guiding the kind of transformative change necessary to truly enhance environmental justice in practice.However, the need for fuller engagement with the dimensions of environmental justice described in this section also pervade the scientific knowledge generation that informs them (Dunlap & Sullivan, 2020;Hajer et al., 2015).These issues require overcoming to increase the pace of progress towards transdisciplinary co-production or local production of knowledge.For example, Betley et al. (this issue) detail biases inherent in different approaches to human well-being, justice and the governance of social-ecological systems.Overcoming the bias in science through critical reflection could be described as the pursuit of cognitive, or epistemic, justice, aligned movements to decolonise western science (Rodriguez, 2017).Although research is often used as a justification for interventions involving capacity building among local communities, there is a case for flipping this narrative to instead focus on building the capacity of western-trained scientists and external practitioners to reflect on their biases (Tengö et al., 2017).This includes ethical questions around consent and ownership, whether Indigenous Peoples and local communities are treated merely as research subjects or participants, as partners or collaborators, or recognized as knowledge holders with rights of data sovereignty (Carroll et al., 2020;Cormack & Kukutai, 2022).

Drawbacks/disadvantages Citation within special feature
There is a risk that constituents which are taken-for-granted will not be cited, while those that have been recently threatened or impacted will be given more prominence Carmenta et al. (2022) Difficult to cover the full range of topics relevant to the well-being of diverse Indigenous and local communities in depth, so justified focus required.Establishing trust critical to success of the method to ensure important, sensitive and controversial topics mentioned and perspectives expressed Dawson et al. (2021) Difficult to generalize or transfer, as the focus is on the depth of place-specific life and phenomena.Requires investment in learning language, and culture and long-term fieldwork.Sometimes considered "subjective" because of proximity to subjects and lack of control over conditions of research Hoelle et al. (2022) The game setting is hypothetical and the "external validity" of these types of approaches is limited Lliso et al. (2022) 1. Significant time and effort are needed to carefully design the questions and test the interviews 2. Depending on the scope of the topic, interviews can be lengthy and result in respondent fatigue Llopis et al. (2022) 1. Results might be affected by power dynamics emerging during group discussions, possibly resulting in bias 2. The method requires very careful and sensitive moderation.
3. If time-constrained, the research team might have difficulties gathering all people necessary to conduct the discussions in a timely manner.

Llopis et al. (2022)
Requires patience but also sensitivity and knowledge of respondents' culture.Interviewers should have the skill to rephrase and guide the conversation appropriately Requires extra time to document and analyse, and to gather complementary information from other sources Sometimes requires going back to the respondent to clarify answers Prior to conducting interviews, interviewers should equip themselves with background knowledge, to identify interesting information to be probed Yuliani et al. (2022) Using AI does not mean we avoid talking about problems completely.We initially discussed problems, and after we gained sufficient understanding, posed questions using AI  et al., 2021), whilst some integrated geospatial land use and land cover change analysis to triangulate qualitative data from participants (Yuliani et al., 2022).
In several instances, combinations of methods were developed and applied in the field.Furthermore, engaged discussion and extended interviews around well-being can fatigue participants while other methods (e.g.participant observation) may be more fluid and less taxing (Coulthard et al., 2015;White, 2014).Across all methods, developing culturally competent and sensitive data gatherers who take the time and invest the care to build trust with interviewees was considered fundamental.
Despite the breadth of methods represented in the Special Feature, many others exist.For example, arts-based methods (e.g.drama and theatre) and Indigenous methodologies (e.g.dialogues, talking circles) and theoretical frameworks such as feminist political ecology that dig deeper in to some of the power dynamics that can afflict research methodologies, and particularly when they are not applied with reflexivity, empathy and deep ethics (Koster et al., 2012).
Overall, operationalizing these methodologies can significantly contribute towards more just and sustainable decisions, by activating key leverage points to foster deep transformative changes.
Recognizing and making visible the diverse values of nature, including relational values and explicitly incorporating them into decisions is a major step (Pascual et al., 2023).Yet, transforming the way science is undertaken and the way institutions regulate decisions, and further shifting dominant paradigms of what is desirable will take longer and likely deliver more profound shifts.

| SUMMARY
Longstanding challenges remain in how we study and address the diversity of human relations with nature, and the social and environmental impacts of policies and interventions.However, interdisciplinary research and collaborations between researchers and We identify key methodological challenges that extending impact appraisal in a plural direction often entails and identify action areas that will be useful for carving a way forward.We outline the ways in which an environmental justice framework demonstrates promise for advancing the case for, and approach to plural valuation.Our hope is that this Special Feature, and its synthesis help to clarify the ways in which practitioners and researchers can carry forward the momentum towards plural valuation that was created by the IPBES values assessment, and move towards the progressive and pluralist social principles which accompany the ambitious global conservation targets for 2030.

ACK N O WLE D G E M ENTS
We would like to thank the many people that gave their time and perspectives to informing the various empirical analyses within the Special Feature that this Synthesis papers draws on.In addition, we honour the memory of our friend and co-author Eleanor J. Sterling (1960Sterling ( -2023)), whose work is a source of inspiration for all of us to find new ways to support biocultural conservation.We are grateful to Svitlana Lavrenciuc for her work on the Figure.• JCL was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation under grant P2BEP2_191790.
Special Feature builds on this thinking and draws together contemporary research from climate, conservation and development fields.It represents an attempt to show how to operationalize complex ideas from a wide range of literature concerning relational values and decolonization into practical methods for impact evaluation and intervention design.It highlights why such efforts are important.Each contribution addresses the plural values of nature and represents a particular emphasis on the role of relational values of nature and the concept of well-being.Although the frameworks and methods are relevant globally, the collection is principally concerned with the contested frontier landscapes of the forested tropics-either in landscapes of land use change (e.g.forest conversion, subsistence agriculture to cash-crops) or in sites of interventions (e.g.protected areas, social forestry, sustainable use reserves).Whilst each of the papers addresses the concept of relational values, they do so in distinct ways-for instance, exploring the contribution of relational values to human well-being and the impacts of land use change, or interventions, on these contributions (Carmenta et al; Betley et al; Llopis et al, this issue); trade-offs related to well-being gains and losses 25758314, 2023, 6, Downloaded from https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pan3.10562 by Nat Prov Indonesia, Wiley Online Library on [13/12/2023].See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions)on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License Feature overcome part of the issues introduced above, by focussing on what is salient locally in terms of value, well-being and the natural world in the context of change.By engaging local perspectives, they have avoided an emphasis on the instrumental values alone and highlight values that otherwise would have remained hidden.Thus, they offer rich insight into diverse relations between people and place, the role of relational values in human well-being and in motivations for engagement with conservation agencies (e.g.Yuliani et al; Lliso et al, this issue).Yet, none of them explore the additional step of extending their findings to different locations, or experiment with scaling the results, indeed the nuance of the studies suggests doing so would not be appropriate.In some ways, the Global Person Generated Index(Carmenta et al., 2022, this issue)    partly overcomes the problem of value incommensurability by relying on perception-based statements of weighted importance across value types.Yet, doing so encounters new conundrums associated with aggregating individually held values and well-being scores to the community level -an issue explored byBetley et al (this issue).
Climate, conservation and development interventions must be anchored in locally relevant theory of change models that are informed by an understanding of previous interventions and their impacts (including the perceived impacts) on local stakeholders (Forster et al., 2022).Taking into consideration the learning afforded by past interventions (e.g.how diverse expectations have been met or not in a given landscape), experience of past risk, or landscape change, is an essential prerequisite to designing new interventions in a way that resonates with local expectations, and that is informed by appropriate theory of change interpretations.For example, resistance to social forestry programs in Sulawesi came about owing to the distrust that was created when a government reforestation program resulted in land dispossession, rather than reflect local commitment to conservation goals (Yuliani et al., 2022, this issue).Lliso et al (this issue) show that understanding how interventions have been introduced and framed with particular values can have different legacy-effects in terms of motivational crowding.Other work has shown how snap-shot interpretations of causal dynamics can seriously misguide intervention strategies, by disconnecting places from their (often colonial) pasts and thereby misdiagnosing the drivers of environmental decline (Carmenta et al, forthcoming).Understanding the historic interplay between intervention, environment and well-being through a plural values approach can offer important lessons for designing interventions that can potentially help restore relationships between people and place.
25758314, 2023, 6, Downloaded from https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pan3.10562 by Nat Prov Indonesia, Wiley Online Library on [13/12/2023].See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions)on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 3.2.3| Ensure that future scenarios include diverse values and worldviewsWe are unequivocally living through an environmental crisis, which appears symptomatic of a values crisis(Martin et al., 2022) and a crisis of meaning(Gilliand, 2021).One of the action points deemed essential across papers involved supporting a broader, societal values shift, through which future scenarios for people and planet may be more sustainable and more just.Climate, conservation, and development actors operate in landscapes where the plurality of values is strong and salient and therefore have the potential to support alternative visions of the future.They can do so by giving better recognition to plural values and thus increase the legitimacy of the plural values that link people, nature and well-being(Carmenta   et al., 2023).Multidimensional well-being and the relational values within itshow great diversity, which manifests in various visions of future development and what constitutes appropriate environment development trade-offs.Some of these visions offer alternatives to the mainstream dogma and could be strengthened by making relational values explicit, visible and legitimate.Alternative development visions are often promoted by Indigenous and social movements and grassroots organizations (e.g., ICCA territories of life, Via Campesina;Kothari et al., 2019).The knowledge and customary institutions of IP&LCs have gained increasing prominence within international environmental agreements, with explicit recognition of their rights, as well as their roles in and contributions to effective and equitable environmental governance (Convention on Biological Diversity, 2022).
Meaningful partnerships with the local communities across the Global South, including resource managers, local authorities, local leaders (including Indigenous leaders), as well a local academic institutions (researchers and students) is most urgently needed to foster this transformation.Decolonizing research funding, to support the active participation of academic and non-academic participants from the Global South, decolonizing research agendas to truly embrace the needs of the local communities, decolonizing conceptual frameworks to transcend epistemic injustice and fully include the knowledges and worldviews at stake, and decolonizing capacity building to foster horizontal north-south, south-north and southsouth collective learning, will all be required(Amano et al., 2023;Economou-Garcia, 2022; Mwampamba et al., 2022).
dural justice would involve co-creation, and thus address the action point above calling for transdisciplinary engagement.Co-creation enables local preferences and priorities to inform development pathways, or strategies to meet climate and conservation goals and can help avoid introducing interventions misaligned with local values (e.g., Llopis et al, this issue).The replacement of local institutions and practices in the name of enhancing livelihoods and sustainability can result in perverse outcomes (e.g.reducing biocultural diversity and well-being) through disempowerment of local communities, and the lack of recognition of their longstanding cultural practices oriented towards sustainable use (Lele, 2013; Rai et al., 2019; Rode et al., 2015).Yuliani et al. (2022) (this issue) show how the adoption of market-based mechanisms and formal government sanctioned systems in Sulawesi have replaced traditional institutions and the cultural values of sacred forest and springs.Although participation of often marginalized communities in the procedures of interven- 25758314, 2023, 6, Downloaded from https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pan3.10562 by Nat Prov Indonesia, Wiley Online Library on [13/12/2023].See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions)on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License Feature.For example: Yuliani et al. (2022) (this issue) describe the value of customary governance based on relational values over commodification and property rights regimes; Carmenta et al. (2022) (this issue) show that more integrated, participatory and deliberative interventions make relatively better (i.e.more) and salient (i.e.locally relevant) contributions to human well-being in the Brazilian Amazon than single sector top down approaches; and Dawson et al. (2021) (this issue) reveal how increased recognition for IP&LCs' knowledge and practices in the Caatinga dry forests of Brazil could unearth effective local conservation solutions and avoid damaging, persistent conflicts around protected areas.Furthermore, interventions and land use change often generate distributional shifts in access to and use of ecosystem services, For example, Yuliani et al. (2022) used an appreciative inquiry technique with semi-structured interviews and focus groups.Dawson et al. used a sequential set of methods that engaged participants early on in defining what was important to their well-being and basing subsequent methods on those results; Llopis et al., 2022 used focus groups (developed in Llopis et al. (2020)) to inform subsequent structured interviews, and Carmenta et al. (2022), applied the Global Person Generated Index (GPGI) to solicit locally salient constituents of well-being and then employed focus groups to better understand perceptions of the causal pathways through which interventions were perceived to have created the impacts experienced.In some instances, data collected qualitatively was quantified upon analysis-for example Llopis et al.'s (2022) hierarchical cluster analysis to develop a typology of households based on the land uses.Other methods to assess subjective well-being and associated values included standardized approaches such as experimental behavioural economics and 'Mini-Q' surveys to identify human-nature relationships and how different value frames impact on the likely effectiveness of Payments for Ecosystem Services interventions(Lliso et al., 2022).In contrast to routine metrics of well-being that tend to emphasize material constituents through predetermined indicators, all of the methods in the Special Feature focused on active engagement of the participants to articulate locally relevant and multi-dimensional constituents of well-being.The papers range from highly standardized to more open and unstructured approaches.Several studies(Carmenta et al., 2022;Llopis et al., 2022) combined standardized question delivery (i.e.asking the same series of questions to respondents) with open responses, thereby allowing respondents to articulate their values and their well-being in their own words and informed by their own subjectivities.Other approaches include soliciting aspirations of a good life in an unstructured way, and a posteriori organizing them into categories that capture the different dimensions expressed(Hoelle et al., 2022).These openended approaches, allow for a high level of nuance in responses and can give rich insight, meanwhile utilizing a level of structure, which may include ranking or enable weighting responses (e.g.GPGI), which can be useful in generating patterns and analysis of the data.Such data can then be categorized using existing well-being and values frameworks, or well-being frameworks can be extended to explore connections between the plural values of nature within multi-dimensional well-being constituents (e.g.Carmenta et al., 2022).The diversity, specifics and place-based nature of values and well-being dimensions across the material, subjective and relational domains was a cross-cutting challenge for assessment.Capturing this diversity can impede the ability to achieve depth on any one dimension.The complexity of well-being, and the contribution of relational values (or goods), might be better captured using openended techniques that solicit highly nuanced insights.Yet such approaches run the risk of missing important factors that are taken for granted(Abunge et al., 2013) and potentially add emphasis to well-being aspects that have been recently threatened and therefore at the forefront of respondents' minds (e.g.Carmenta et al., 2022).
25758314, 2023, 6, Downloaded from https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pan3.10562 by Nat Prov Indonesia, Wiley Online Library on [13/12/2023].See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions)on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License communities have provided promising steps in the direction of finding a path forward.We synthesize across a suite of empirical studies that have addressed plural valuation of global environmental change, or explored the impacts of interventions associated with it.These approaches ground our understanding of what it means to be living with change and these insights are imperative in order to move towards justice in the design and implementation of climate, conservation and development intervention.

•
RC would like to thank the support of the Frank Jackson Foundation, the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) through the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) grant number NE/T010401/1.This theme is also linked to new work under the 'Voices of Recovery project' funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/X001733/1) under the framework of the Trans-Atlantic Platform, and with colleagues from University of East Anglia, UK, National Center for Monitoring and Early Warning of Natural Disasters, Brazil and Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and Universidad de Caldas, Colombia.• JGZ and JCL acknowledges support from the Swiss Programme for Research on Global Issues for Development (r4d programme), funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC).Elements of this work were undertaken whilst J.G.Z. was a visiting scholar at the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge (May 2018-April 2019), supported through Scientific Exchange funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), under Grant No. IZSEZ0_180391.• BL acknowledges support from the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation, the Department of Education, Language Policy and Culture of the Basque government (grant number PI2015-1-103 and IT1359-19 [UPV/EHU Econometrics Research Group]), and by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness MINECO through BC3 María de Maeztu excellence accreditation MDM-2017-0714 and through grant ECO2017-82111-R.• ND was supported by the British Council's Newton Fund Institutional Links Program, project 275896277 'Advancing equity in Brazilian protected area management' and through the Just Conservation project funded by the synthesis center CESAB of the French Foundation for Research on Biodiversity (FRB; www.fonda tionb iodiv ersite.fr).• EJS, EB, AS acknowledge work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant numbers No. EF-1427091, EF-1427453, and 1444184 and work conducted by the Assessing Biocultural Indicators Working Group supported in part by SNAPP: Science for Nature and People Partnership, a collaboration of The Nature Conservancy, the Wildlife Conservation Society and the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at the University of California, Santa Barbara.Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.Support for their work also comes from Lynette and Richard Jaffe and the Jaffe Family Foundation.

3.4 | Tools and approaches: Practical ways to evaluate the social impacts of climate, conservation and development intervention and change in tropical landscapes A
Downloaded from https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pan3.10562 by Nat Prov Indonesia, Wiley Online Library on [13/12/2023].See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions)on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License great many tools are available for evaluating non-tangible and plural values in impact appraisal.The variety of interview approaches,