Curr. Opin. Environ. Sustain. http://doi.org/cxjp (2018).

There is a tendency in social sciences to reinvent old concepts into new wordings. This entails two main risks: that scientific discussions become semantic and that knowledge is not additive, because we use different terms for the same ideas. An emerging concept in sustainability is that of relational values, which appears fuzzy to the non-experts and resonates old ideas.

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Roldan Muradian from Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil, and Unai Pascual from Basque Centre for Climate Change, Spain, propose a structured way to comprehend the meaning and novelty of relational values. They develop a typology of how people understand human–nature relations, describing seven worldviews. According to two of the views, devotion and ritualized exchange, nature is an entity with agency on its own. The other five views believe that nature has no agency and each of them is driven by a different emotion: detachment is driven by indifference, domination by fear, stewardship by a sense of belonging, wardship by care, and utilization by the urge to satisfy one’s own needs. This typology can clarify debates about how relational values affect decision-making.