‘I didn’t count “willingness to pay” as part of the value’: Monetary valuation through respondents’ perspectives

A frequent justification in the literature for using stated preference methods (SP) is that they are the only methods that can capture the so-called total economic value (TEV) of environmental changes to society. Based on follow-up interviews with SP survey respondents, this paper addresses the impl...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inEnvironmental values Vol. 33; no. 2; pp. 163 - 188
Main Authors Isacs, Lina, Håkansson, Cecilia, Lindahl, Therese, Gunnarsson-Östling, Ulrika, Andersson, Pernilla
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published London, England SAGE Publications 01.04.2024
Subjects
ecological economics
CBA
neoclassical economics
qualitative research
non-use values
ethics
non-market valuation
deliberation
performativity
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Summary:A frequent justification in the literature for using stated preference methods (SP) is that they are the only methods that can capture the so-called total economic value (TEV) of environmental changes to society. Based on follow-up interviews with SP survey respondents, this paper addresses the implications of that argument by shedding light on the construction of TEV, through respondents’ perspective. It illuminates the deficiencies of willingness to pay (WTP) as a measure of value presented as three aggregated themes considering respondents’ unintentionality, their retraction once they understood that their WTP could be decisive in cost-benefit analysis and the inherent incompleteness of WTP. We discuss why the TEV discourse persists, how it conceals rather than reveals broader notions of value and in what ways our results support the development of alternative approaches that truly endorse plurality in environmental valuation and decision-making.
ISSN:0963-2719
1752-7015
DOI:10.1177/09632719241231509