Cultural Values Related to Marine and Coastal Environments

Cultural values of the coast and sea are rooted in specific land and seascapes, material and non-material heritage, including language and cultural practices. The way they are managed matters greatly for our quality of life. Concepts of cultural values include broad, overarching values, specific values ascribed to particular aspects of the marine environment, diverse value indicators, and the diverse contributions of culture to society. This chapter presents the typology of values developed by the Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), including four life frames (living from, with, in, and as nature) that are used to organize the typology. We build on this conceptual foundation to develop key aspects and types of cultural values in more detail. We then present a diverse range of qualitative and quantitative methods to assess cultural values and discuss five case studies from the UK and Sweden, pertaining to relational values of wild swimming, economic assessment of living fishing heritage, deliberation on value conflicts in fjord management, cultural values of seaweed farming, and understanding local values of marine management in the context of the life frames. Finally, we consider the implications of these diverse cases for how cultural values are to be understood, including with regard to place, relationality, substitutability of value, power relations, framing conflicts, participation, method integration, sectoral integration in management, and the potential of harnessing cultural values for transformation towards sustainability and justice.