ABSTRACT
The purpose of this book is to provide researchers and facilitators of sustainable development a starting point from which to include others' values in their projects. It is not a comprehensive guide on values research. It is an introduction, intended to provide the reader with a foundation from which they can develop the skills to understand participants' values — especially participants whose cultural and socio-economic background, and values are significantly different. What follows is a sketch of a roadmap of how to build co-creative capacity among sustainable development project participants by developing and engaging participants' values. At first, this appears to be a simple task: just ask, “what do you care about, what do you value?” Actually, those two questions should be asked, but they are not sufficient. Not because participants lie or are unaware of their values, but because values are often ambivalent, contradictory, and may change in intensity as the understanding of the situation changes. Facilitators' and participants' values can be inferred by observing behavior, and captured ethnographically. Values are at the heart of any inquiry: “No problem can be adequately formulated unless the values involved… are stated” (C. W. Mills, 1959, Sociological Imagination, Oxford, p. 129). Certainly sustainable development, generative though it may be, is all about threatening changes. An objective understanding of values is not sufficient; ideally one must also develop a subjective understanding. To conceptualize as C. W. Mills suggests requires both the objective and the subjective, what Clifford Greertz called “thick description.”
