Nature affinity and willingness to pay for urban green spaces in a developing country

Urban green spaces (UGS) provide multiple ecosystem services to city residents and are often their only places to spend time in a natural environment. Rapid urbanisation poses difficult choices for city planners who frequently decide to prioritise built infrastructure over retaining or enhancing green spaces, not least because the value of green spaces is rarely recognised in policy and planning processes. This is particularly true in developing countries which face rapidly growing populations and trade-offs between the growing demand for built infrastructure and access to nature. We address the value of public UGS using both a monetary approach and a non-monetary approach. A Contingent Valuation (CV) survey was used to elicit householderś willingness-to-pay (WTP) for three different scenarios to enhance public UGS provision in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Scenarios were based on ongoing public debates on how to address the degradation and loss of existing park areas and on current plans to build new parks. The same survey also employed the Nature Relatedness (NR) scale, which measures individual cognitive attachment to nature, as a non-monetary valuation approach. Our findings showed that a high attachment to nature does not necessarily lead to higher WTP for improved provision of public UGS as WTP is constrained by household characteristics such as income, education and household size. We concluded that monetary valuation techniques could potentially underestimate the value attached to UGS by some population groups (e.g. rural migrants and pensioners) that attach great importance to UGS but whose values are not reflected in a high WTP. Thus, we argue that the assessment of the value of UGS would benefit from combining monetary and non-monetary approaches under various institutional contexts; and that this would be particularly important for cities in developing countries.