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

Lina Isacs, Cecilia Håkansson, Therese Lindahl, Ulrika Gunnarsson-Östling and Pernilla Andersson Joona
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Lina Isacs: Institute for Housing and Urban Research, Uppsala University, Uppsala
Cecilia HÃ¥kansson: KTH, Royal Institute of Technology, Department of Sustainable Development, Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Stockholm, Sweden
Therese Lindahl: The Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, The Royal Swedish Academy of Science, Stockholm, Sweden
Ulrika Gunnarsson-Östling: KTH, Royal Institute of Technology, Department of Sustainable Development, Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Stockholm, Sweden

Environmental Values, 2024, vol. 33, issue 2, 163-188

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: CBA; non-use values; non-market valuation; neoclassical economics; ecological economics; deliberation; qualitative research; ethics; performativity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envval:v:33:y:2024:i:2:p:163-188

DOI: 10.1177/09632719241231509

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