How environmental values take shape: constitutive values and norm circles

Calls for transformative change have renewed attention to the role of values in sustainability. Yet existing approaches often treat values as individual preferences or attitudes, overlooking how they are socially constructed and sustained. This paper integrates the philosophical notion of constitutive value with the sociological concept of norm circles to develop an understanding of environmental values as parts of people’s identities, practices and moral worlds. With traditional lobster fishing in Wagu, Japan, as our case study, we illustrate how cooperative norms and shared practices nurture ethics of care, restraint and stewardship that, over time, become constitutive of community identity and moral life. Recognising these processes clarifies how moral and institutional orders that support biodiversity governance are continually created, maintained and transformed through everyday practice, thereby laying the groundwork for a constitutive economics of biodiversity.