The deliberative value formation model
Thoughts on Kenter, Reed & Fazey (2016)
Thanks to Emily Gates for the heads-up on this paper:
Kenter, J.O., Reed, M.S., Fazey, I. (2016). The Deliberative Value Formation model. Ecosystem Services, Vol. 21, Part B, Oct 2016, pp. 194-207.
Give it a read. Not only is it open-access, it’s also published in a format you can actually read on your phone!
Here’s what it means to me…
Imagine a community facing a decision like whether to build a new factory in a rural area.
The factory will create jobs, but it also has potential environmental impacts. Opinions about the proposed factory are divided. Some emphasise economic benefits, while others prioritise environmental sustainability and social equity. These differing views within the community reflect values that, although deeply held, aren’t fully articulated nor, collectively, well-understood.
A cost-benefit analysis (CBA) has been done, focusing on monetisable resources and outcomes. It suggests that the factory will create more economic value for the community than it consumes, but it doesn’t capture softer values such as cultural heritage, environmental protection, and intergenerational equity, which are central to some community members’ concerns.
Deliberative Value Formation is designed to help in these kinds of circumstances.
Kenter, Reed and Fazey (2016) presented the Deliberative Value Formation (DVF) model as a framework for surfacing and reflecting on the values that underpin community decisions, especially in complex and contested scenarios like the one above.
The DVF model acknowledges the limitations of CBA and aims to integrate those missing ‘softer’ values into the decision-making process. The model includes:
A structured process of six steps for designing effective deliberative valuation, starting with broad “transcendental” values before translating them into specific “contextual” values;
A foundation in social-psychological theory to move beyond economic valuation metrics, aiming to improve the rigour and inclusivity of environmental decision-making;
Recognition of power dynamics and individual capacities; not all participants have equal knowledge or influence, and skilled facilitation is needed to create an environment where all stakeholders can engage meaningfully;
Social learning, allowing participants to develop their understanding and preferences through dialogue and interaction; and
Addressing the potential for bias in deliberative processes through careful design and facilitation.
The paper covers theoretical and practical underpinnings of deliberation, valuation and shared values that inform the DVF model. It describes how deliberation can help to inform individual values, elicit shared values, and facilitate rational debate. It outlines different dimensions and types of shared values, and unpacks mechanisms through which deliberation helps to shape values. The authors identify nine key factors that affect the quality and success of deliberative valuation and explains how these factors are incorporated into the DVF model. I won’t repeat it all here but suggest you check it out.
In the context of our hypothetical rural community, the DVF model offers a structured approach to ensure that the diverse, sometimes conflicting values at play - such as economic growth, environmental sustainability and social equity - are discussed and understood. Not only should this help the community arrive at a well-formed decision; it also stands to strengthen the democratic legitimacy of the decision, ensuring that it reflects the values of the community as a whole.
In concrete terms, what might this process look like?
To illustrate the six steps of the DVF process (as I understand them), the community could be engaged as follows to deliberate over the proposed factory:
Establish the institutional context. The first step would be to clearly define the terms of reference, scope and limitations of the decision-making process. This is crucial for setting clear boundaries and expectations. The community must understand the purpose of the deliberation process, who is (and isn’t) involved and why. There should be clarity about which issues are open for debate (such as environmental impact and economic benefits) and which are outside the purview (e.g., aspects that can’t be changed such as legal restrictions on land use or zoning).
Deliberate on transcendental values. The community members would then deliberate on the overarching values that inform their views on the factory. This could involve methods like storytelling or guided discussions to uncover shared societal principles such as environmental justice, economic prosperity, and community well-being. For example, one group may highlight the value of clean air as a transcendental concern, while another might focus on the economic opportunities that the facility could bring. By surfacing these fundamental beliefs, the community can better understand what principles are most important to them in the decision.
Explore contextual beliefs and broader impacts. At this stage, “the focus shifts to participants’ beliefs around the issues at hand”. For example, the community could explore how the factory might affect their lives, examining both positive and negative impacts. Participatory tools, systems modelling or expert presentations could help clarify these impacts by exploring how the factory might affect the local economy, ecosystems or public health. For example, experts might present data on potential air quality degradation or increased truck traffic, while community members reflect on how these issues might influence their daily lives and wellbeing. (The paper notes that this step can be implemented through structured analytical approaches such as multicriteria analysis. I’ll come back to this).
Evaluate implications for transcendental values. The community would then assess how well the proposed factory aligns with their transcendental values. For example, if the factory promises economic growth but at the cost of environmental harm, participants would deliberate on whether the economic benefits justify the potential long-term harm to the community's health and ecosystems. In this step, the group reflects on whether the factory supports their larger ethical principles or diminishes them, guiding the conversation toward finding a balance between competing values.
Discuss norms and contextual values. In this step, the group would begin to focus on the specific contextual values that will guide the decision, drawing on insights from all of the preceding steps. Participants would discuss how the various impacts (economic, environmental, and social) contribute to the right outcome, considering both individual/subgroup preferences and the common good. For example, one group might argue that economic growth is essential for the community’s future, while another may prioritise the preservation of natural landscapes for future generations. The community would then discuss the relative importance of these different values, deciding whether the facility should be approved and under what conditions, based on an increasingly (though perhaps not completely) shared understanding of what is best for the community as a whole.
Establish value indicators. Finally, the community would create concrete “indicators” to reflect their values and preferences. This could involve identifying willingness to pay for environmental protections, setting up ratings or rankings for the most important outcomes (e.g., job creation vs. pollution control), or collectively voting on which policy options should move forward. In the case of the factory, the community might decide that certain environmental safeguards, such as air quality monitoring or pollution reduction commitments, are non-negotiable. By establishing these “value indicators” (as the DVF model calls them), the community can clearly communicate what is necessary for their support, providing a concrete basis for decision-making and ensuring that their values are integrated into the final decision.
Although presented as a series of steps, the DVF process is iterative, recognising that the deliberation may involve revisiting earlier steps as new information or perspectives emerge.
What might such a process achieve? Let me paint a picture…
Imagine the approach described above fosters an inclusive decision-making process where diverse stakeholders actively participate, promoting social learning about environmental, economic, and cultural impacts. This leads to more informed perspectives and a deeper reflection on personal and collective values.
By explicitly connecting these values to the decision-making process, DVF helps to bridge gaps between differing viewpoints. It helps participants to align decisions with their ethical beliefs while addressing the complex issues surrounding the proposed factory.
Through the guided deliberation process, DVF helps translate broad principles like justice and stewardship into specific, context-dependent values, such as the right to clean air or the importance of preserving local heritage. It ensures that even “hidden” values, like cultural significance or intergenerational responsibility, are made explicit, considered, and integrated.
By encouraging social learning, critical thinking, and openness to new ideas, the DVF model fosters a democratic and participatory process where stakeholders refine their values and adapt their views based on new information.
Ultimately, the DVF approach mitigates against a narrow, economic-only focus by ensuring that ethical, cultural, and environmental concerns are better integrated into decision-making. It enhances the legitimacy and fairness of the outcome, through the use of a rigorous and inclusive framework for balancing diverse values in complex decisions.
Well, perhaps it helps inch the dial in that direction.
Relevance to Evaluation & VfI?
It strikes me that DVF has some features in common with the Value for Investment approach. Both DVF and VfI seek to integrate insights from economic analysis with wider values and evidence, in order to reach deeper understandings and support good decision-making.
Both DVF and VfI recognise that there’s more to values than the self-interested preferences of individuals (the traditional utilitarian building block of valuation in CBA). Value is the merit, worth or significance that people and groups place on something (e.g., a resource, an action, an impact) and can be held by individuals, communities, whole societies, or specific interest groups. Money can be a convenient measure of value but some things aren’t easily valued in monetary terms.
Both models recognise that values are shaped by context and can evolve through stakeholder deliberation. Both models recognise the implications of power dynamics; that who participates and how are fundamental ethical issues that directly affect the validity, credibility and utility of a decision. Accordingly, both models are inclusive, ensuring that people affected by the proposal and those who affect the proposal (e.g., indigenous rights-holders, other local residents, environmental advocates, business owners, etc) have a voice.
Both models guide stakeholders through (different) deliberative processes that start with big-picture, holistic, systemic thinking, progress through analytic thinking, and then put the pieces back together to reach holistic judgements:
When articulating a program’s context and value proposition, VfI seeks to exercise the right hemispheres of participants’ brains - tapping into their creativity, intuition, tacit knowledge, visual and nonverbal thinking. Subsequently, when developing criteria and standards aligned with the value proposition, and identifying evidence sources, VfI shifts into analytic thinking, bringing in the left hemisphere to start organising concepts. Following data gathering and analysis, a synthesis process is followed to make sense of evidence through the lens of criteria and standards, recombining the elements into a cohesive whole.
Similarly, DVF progresses from deliberation on big-picture, shared societal and cultural values through contextual beliefs, progressively narrowing down to clarifying contextual values and specific value indicators to support well-formed holistic decisions.
Could there be synergies between these two approaches?
DVF and VfI are complementary in a manner that suggests they could be used in mutually reinforcing ways. The DVF model’s primary focus is on understanding how values are formed and shaped through deliberative processes. The VfI approach focuses on identifying and using explicit values to assess how well resources are used and whether the value created justifies the investment. These foci overlap but vary in emphasis: While the DVF model concentrates on the science of how to surface values in complex situations for collective decision-making, VfI focuses on using criteria and standards to make value judgements.
The two models are grounded in complementary theoretical frameworks. While VfI is explicit about combining theory and practice from evaluation and economics, DVF is grounded in social-psychological theory - including the Value-Belief-Norm theory, the Theory of Planned Behaviour, and the Value Change Model, to explain how deliberation influences individual and shared values.
The potential applications of the DVF model are diverse, as the paper notes:
The DVF can be applied as a foundation for characterising, designing, facilitating, and analysing a very wide range of deliberative methods, such as citizens’ juries, in-depth discussion groups, multicriteria analysis, deliberated preferences, deliberative democratic monetary valuation, participatory mapping and modelling, and deliberative-interpretive valuation approaches such as art-led deliberations…
The reference to multicriteria analysis caught my attention, as did the potential around deliberative democratic monetary valuation. These possibilities both connect with aspects of the VfI approach (evaluative synthesis, and monetary valuation respectively). Multicriteria analysis uses numerical scores to summarise evaluative judgements against individual criteria, and a weighting system to synthesise them into an overall judgement. I’ve summarised Michael Scriven’s and Jane Davidson’s critiques of multicriteria analysis previously, and argued that rubrics represent an ordinal or qualitative alternative with the flexibility to apply in a wider range of situations, providing an intuitive framework that can help to guide group deliberations.
I see the potential for a natural synergy between evaluation rubrics and DVF. For example, insights from DVF could be used to enhance strategies for surfacing values in a VfI evaluation: DVF goes deep into the theory and practice of deliberative valuing and offers frameworks that could guide the planning and implementation of effective stakeholder engagement processes (for evaluation generally and VfI specifically), using transcendental values as a stepping stone to contextual rubrics.
Conversely, explicit evaluative reasoning has the potential to enhance DVF. Tools from evaluation, like rubrics, can be used to help structure and focus deliberations with stakeholders. More fundamentally they can support more systematic, comprehensive and defensible decisions by providing an evaluative framework for scaffolding well-formed judgements and making reasoning processes more transparent. I can almost see the general logic of evaluation reflected in the DVF process. I think it is there but it hasn’t been labelled as such. Making evaluative reasoning explicit could help in facilitating, structuring, communicating, and quality-assuring decisions from DVF processes.
DVF appears to be geared to ex-ante decision-making, i.e., using values to inform future steps. The VfI process has started to gain some traction in ex-ante evaluation but, to date, has mainly been used ex-post, determining the quality and value of policies and programs during and after their implementation. Of course, ex-ante and ex-post evaluation are interconnected; the purposes of ex-post evaluation often include informing ex-ante next steps, conversely ex-ante decision-making may include provisions for ex-post monitoring and evaluation. These connections hint at another potential synergy between DVF and VfI, to assist in better integrating components of the policy cycle in circumstances that involve public deliberations.
Bottom line
As the authors put it,
Application of a deliberative approach to establish shared values is likely to be particularly important in cases where: 1) issues or ecosystem services under consideration are complex; 2) there is substantial uncertainty; 3) values are likely to be subtle and implicit; 4) issues or evidence are contested; 5) or there are a large number of different stakeholders. If decision-makers take account of a plurality of value perspectives through an effective process of deliberative value formation, decisions are likely to be more reflective of the values held by those affected by the decision, better informed, perceived as more legitimate and less contested (Kenter, Reed & Fazey, 2016).
Yep.
It’s been hard reading the news lately. I hope you’re all doing OK. This picture is titled The Screech. 2020. Materials: Rubber chicken on iPad. Adapted from the iconic work of Edvard Munch. From my lockdown collection, The Adventures of Hehū.