Valuation of unpriced products: contingent valuation, cost–benefit analysis and participatory democracy

Cost–benefit analysis seeks to measure ‘full value’ of forests. Its willingness to pay measure has been criticised, particularly when elicited by contingent valuation. This method certainly has faults, eliciting inconsistent, symbolic and citizen values, and sensitive to elicitation method. However, these problems also affect democratic procedures; and such methods arguably overweight short-term processes. Many other techniques exist for bringing ‘full value’ into cost–benefit analysis: measuring downstream production for physical products; deducing psychic values from indirect market data. Questionnaire methods are best transmuted to compare similar entities and combined with other evaluative tools.