At home in the penumbra: how hermeneutical environmental ethics can contribute to a relational biodiversity economics

The paper addresses how relational biodiversity economics could benefit from turning to environmental hermeneutics in valuation research to complement traditional environmental ethics. The paper presents environmental hermeneutics as an approach that focuses on understanding (rather than judging) actual value articulations, how they dynamically emerge and evolve, and how the relationships between people and environment are always already interpretive and embedded in socio-historical processes of meaning-making. The paper also suggests how a specifically hermeneutical environmental ethics can , by engaging with decolonial traditions, strongly support a call for epistemic justice in valuation research.