Understanding relational values in cultural landscapes in Romania and Germany

Relational values recently emerged as a concept to comprehensively
understand and communicate the many values of nature. Relational values
can be defined as preferences and principles about human-nature
relationships and focus both on human-nature connections, as well as
human-human connections. Here, drawing on 819 face-to-face questionnaires,
we analysed relational, intrinsic and instrumental values across a total
of six agricultural landscapes in Transylvania (Romania) and Lower Saxony
(Germany). The landscapes described a gradient of land use intensity,
within and across the countries. Our results suggest a bundling of values
into four groups: those concerned with individual cognition (including
intrinsic values), those that focus on nature as a place for social
interaction and relaxation, those that capture cultural identity and
spiritual values and one bundle that only includes instrumental values.
These different values, in turn, were strongly related to (i) respondents’
attitudes towards environmental conservation and the (ii) frequency with
which respondents used nature as a resource.  Instrumental values
have the tendency to be inversely related with relational values and were
found to increase with the land use intensity of the focal landscapes.