Values: dollars, trees or feelings? Denise Dillon, JCU BEST EN Think Tank IX, James Cook University June

What are values? Economics – Quantifiable, monetary exchange rates – Natural capital Natural sciences – Quantifiable, environmental attributes, processes Social sciences – Qualitative, foundational to human attitudes & behaviour Tourism – all of these?

World Heritage Values ‘outstanding, universally valuable examples of natural and cultural heritage’ Wet Tropics World Heritage Area and Great Barrier Reef Marine Park are tourism ‘drawcards’ Are values ‘in’ the environment or within human appreciation of environmental attributes, features & processes?

Language in use Profound effect of language on how individuals view and understand the world Profound influence of language on how individuals construct their own realities To understand the role of ‘values’ in practices must consider the range of interpretations available to stakeholders

Language of environmentalism Stakeholders active in World Heritage Areas include social scientists, environmental scientists, environmental managers, economists, tourism operators, local residents, freeholders, indigenous owners, activists, tourism operators, tourists … A study of language use requires a real world context and a suitably representative sample of language

Method for text analysis Group selection – Wet Tropics Management Authority, WTMA – Rainforest Cooperative Research Centre, CRC – Cairns and Far North Environment Centre, CAFNEC Groups actively involved in discussion of environmental matters in the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area – Similar missions & goals but different primary focus

Method for text analysis Document selection – Archived documents available to and targeted towards the public – Newsletters, reports, information sheets Initial search for occurrences of the target word ‘values’ or variants Documents with target word retained except for those with >50 occurrences - discarded as outliers

Type-token Relationships for the Sample Documents and Three Group Sub-samples Document source VTTTRTTR ' TTR+TTR ' WTMA CRC CAFNEC Combined V = types; T = tokens; TTR = type/token ratio, V/T; TTR' = log type/token ratio, logV/logT WTMA, n = 22; CRC, n = 28; CAFNEC, n = 18; Combined, n = 68

Keyword and Occurrence Counts for the Sample and Three Sub-samples Source Document count Keywords Occurrences Count Percent of total Count Percent of total WTMA %307318% CRC % % CAFNEC %302718% Combined % % Keyword percentages for the three groups do not sum to 100, as most keywords were not unique to one group.

Preparing text units for analysis Select sufficient context while limiting extraneous ‘noise’ – Pseudoparagraphs constructed by selecting a sentence containing each occurrence of the target word plus one sentence preceding & one following – Exclude function words (i.e. articles, prepositions), retain content words (e.g. nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) – Set frequency thresholds to exclude low frequency items in relatively fewer documents

Shared vocabulary, but differences CAFNEC CRC WORLD HERITAGE VALUES ACTIVITY WORLD HERITAGE AREA WORLD HERITAGE LIST CULTURAL VALUES WTMA NATURAL VALUES PROTECTION HERITAGE PEOPLE CONSERVATION ENSURE PLANT HABITAT WATER ENVIRONMENT FORESTSPECIES BIODIVERSITY CONTROL EVALUATE PROJECT RESEARCH ECONOMIC INCREASE VALUE RESOURCE FUTURE

Impact of values on behaviour? Firstly we need to understand what values are, in different contexts, for different people Values in tourism industry are measurable in dollars BUT Values are also measurable as biophysical characteristics of the environment AND Values are measurable within affective responses to an environment