| The concept of natural capital is derived from the ideology of sustainable development. It strengthens the non-depletion and proliferation of ecological environment and natural resources as they are the "capital" of human social development, and therefore could be introduced into empirical studies as an alternative concept of natural resources. Specifically speaking, natural capital is the stock of the ecosystem's environmental asset which helps to generate valuable goods and services to mankind. Its serviceability on the one hand includes the direct use value and economic value of water, atmosphere, soil, and other basic material elements, and on the other hand includes the aesthetic, historical, and recreational values it created during the interactive process with human society, as well as the spiritual, cultural, and social values derived from them ---- plural value is an important theoretical tool to understand and evaluate natural capital.After introducing the instability and discontinuity of individual environmental preferences, as well as the incomparability and incommensurability of plural values in different realms, this research chooses Wuhan East Lake Scenic Area as the specific object, and conducts two rounds of public value recognitions and demands-based measurement of the natural capital's plural values by Contingent Value Method (CVM) and Deliberative Monetary Valuation (DMV) respectively. The first round of survey proved the existence of plural values by interview-questionnaire, and formed a statistic conclusion on public environmental value recognitions; and by introducing deliberation mechanism on this basis, the second round of survey validated the assumption that the interviewees' environmental preferences may change with the conditions of individual cognitive level, information receiving pattern, and decision model, and further discussed the ways of plural value expression and realization of real environmental behaviors and policies.According to the characteristics of plural values in different realms and the results of two rounds of survey, this research structured a "Plural Value Account of Natural Capital" to demonstrate the types of plural values, their beneficiary groups, recognition degree, demand degree, and important value relations, etc., so as to provide evidences to explain or solve the value conflicts of environmental problems. Furthermore, according to the interviewees' statements, this research discussed the widespread existed lexicographic, or similar strong preferences, and described the process that individual environmental preferences aggregate into collective environmental views. This research believes that, with the constantly improvement of social livings, the public value demands on natural capital is nowadays shifting towards a multiple and long-term beneficial way, and thus the mismatch between the value goals of environment policies and the value demands of the public is one of the factors that cause environmental conflicts today.Introducing deliberative discussion into the second round survey is not only a preference measurement under the condition of information access changes, but also is a simulation of actual environmental decision-making process. By analyzing the procedure and effect of the deliberative discussion, this research suggested that, as a kind of collective selection mechanisms, deliberation plays positive roles on the expression and realization of natural capital's plural values ---- democratic and sufficient deliberation effectively avoids decision makers proposing self-interested motives-based policies, and promote the overall value cognitive level of the decision makers. And besides, deliberation provides opportunities for decision makers who hold different value demands to compromise in the negotiation or compensate each other, therefore, to a large extent, it could alleviate the value conflicts caused by different beneficiary groups who perform environmental behaviors or policies according to their own value demands. |
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