Public values for integration in natural disaster management and planning: A case study from Victoria, Australia

- Framework useful to identify and organize concrete and abstract social values.
- Values at all levels of abstraction can be affected by disasters and their mitigation.
- Values for natural landscapes tend to be more abstract and larger in scale.
- Specific people and properties are valued most prevalently in the data.
- People with more recent direct personal experience of bushfire refer less to natural places and attributes.

Values can be useful for identifying what is important to individuals and communities, yet there is currently not a coherent way to conceptualize, identify, and organize the breadth of values that can be affected by a natural disaster. This research proposes a conceptual framework for how to conceptualize, identify, and organize values, and proposes a concrete, tangible value called the valued entity. The framework is applied in two studies of bushfire in Victoria, Australia: 112 submissions from individuals to the 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission and interviews with 30 members of the public in bushfire risk landscapes. Our findings suggest that: what people value ranges from abstract to concrete; prevalent abstract values include benevolence and universalism; prevalent mid-level valued attributes include natural attributes of landscapes and human life and welfare; prevalent valued entities are people and properties close to the person. Comparison between the two studies suggests people with more recent experience with bushfire refer less to the importance of natural places and natural attributes. The conceptual framework can act as a boundary object to facilitate researchers and policy-makers understanding the breadth of values affected by natural disaster events and management actions and how governance can better consider values at different scales.