Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
7.5 Discussion
There is a tendency in some quarters to think of economic valuation as either a 'silver bullet'
or else a bitter pill that needs to be swallowed, typically as a means to an end in terms of
promoting a conservation proposal. In some respects the content of this chapter supports this
proposition, in that the principal focus has been on a particular case study (the UK Marine
and Coastal Access Act) that
required
an economic assessment for impact assessment pur-
poses (BERR,
2008
) and
unequivocally supported
the conservation outcome, i.e. a network
of marine protected areas.
The core questions to be addressed in this final section pertain to the replicability of the
study methodology in different socio-cultural contexts around the globe and, more funda-
mentally, whether indeed such approaches ought to be promoted in other contexts. The latter
has been touched on in
Section 7.4
,
which considered the limitations of valuation (both spe-
cifically to the case study and also more generically), but this section aims to tie the strands
together and present some conclusions.