Methods for valuation of nature and NCPs may be termed value articulating institutions since they are based on a set of rules concerning the valuing process: Participation: who participates; in what capacity; and how. What counts as data and what form it should take (prices, weights, arguments, physical measures etc.). The kind of data handling procedures involved: how data is produced; and how data are compared, weighed or aggregated.

Set of values according to which people, societies and organizations regulate their behaviour. Value systems can be identified in both individuals and social groups.

Sets of values according to which people, societies and organizations regulate their behaviour.

Value pluralism is the idea that there are several values which may be equally correct and fundamental, and yet in conflict with each other. It is the opposite of value monism. More broadly speaking, value pluralism may also refer to different people having different worldviews and hence different values. In addition, these plural values may be incommensurable (i.e. they do not share a single unit of measurement, a single metric, and that there is no objective way of comparing them or weighting them against each other).

Derives from a utilitarian perspective on human-nature relationships which privileges some values of nature over others (usually monetary values).

Indicators of value are quantitative and qualitative measures of the importance of nature to people. Indicators used to express the value of nature can be biophysical, economic and socio-cultural.

'Value formation' refers to how values develop in the first place. It can occur in individual-focused processes, trough socially-oriented processes or in social-ecological processes that do not separate humans and nature.

Values can be expressed explicitly through language and implicitly through actions like choices, decisions made, everyday practices or rituals. Valuation methods are used to undertake explicit valuation. Methods and approaches to integrate and bridge values, provide knowledge about nature’s values as input to decision-making.

Value change refers to the modification of people’s values or of the prioritization of their values in particular contexts. Value change processes occur at different social scales, from large-scale cultural shifts (e.g. intergenerational shifts due to changing demography or changes to shared values) to small-scale personal shifts (e.g. values formation and change over an individual’s lifetime).

A value can be a principle or core belief underpinning rules and moral judgments. Values as principles vary from one culture to another and also between individuals and groups.