Sustainability-aligned values: exploring the concept, evidence, and practice
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Modern environmental thought has always involved normative claims about the values needed for sustainability. This has often played out in debates between proponents of anthropocentric and ecocentric ways of valuing nature. More recently, there has been a flourishing of interest in relational and pluricentric ways of valuing nature, coinciding with a “turn to values” in the sustainability literature. In this paper we explore the meaning and use of the term “sustainability-aligned values.” Following the 2022 IPBES Values Assessment we consider these as values that are crucial for shaping decisions that will help bring about sustainability. Our characterization of sustainably-aligned values assumes inherent pluralism because of diverse interpretations of sustainability and of pathways toward it. Nevertheless, a review of three bodies of literature suggests that there is considerable agreement about the kinds of values that align with sustainability. In particular, the nurturing of certain relational values is now widely seen as supportive of sustainability, including values regarding what matters in human interactions with nature (such as stewardship), and values regarding relationships between humans (such as collectivism). We proceed to pose critical questions about the proposition that certain values support sustainability. We ask whether this emerging body of thought is consistent with pluralist requirements to foster values diversity, whether an agenda to nurture values aligned with sustainability is actionable, and how mobilizing sustainability-aligned values entails addressing power imbalances.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it