Initial Research Design: ‘Human, non-human and environmental value systems: an impossible frontier?’

The research programme to which the title refers was initially submitted for funding to the Leverhulme Trust in January 2012, discussed in London in May, awarded in July, begun in September, with the group holding their first workshop in December 2012. This first paper reproduces, with some alterations and reflections, our research design and derivative research protocol. It seeks to show how we are researching the broad and somewhat amorphous concept of ‘value’ through case studies in which the social articulation of valuation takes place. The paper outlines the research protocol by which we will make our empirical results commensurable across the three research domains of development, environment and conservation. We are analyzing how humans, non-human species, the environment and policy interventions are variously valued using calculative technologies, within institutional assemblages and discursive framings, this latter being the particular narratives, value framings and discursive meanings used to explain or understand the valuation process. We are also studying what emerges from this valuation process, which we term valued entities, which are new subjects and objects which have latent, emergent and unique properties.