A Formal Critique of the Value of the Colombian Páramo
This work addresses ecological and social issues in the Colombian Páramo, offering a novel formal approach but is incremental in its methodological application.
The paper critiques the valuation of ecosystem services in the Colombian Páramo, arguing that current frameworks reproduce problematic social relations, and proposes a computational dialogical scenario to explore contradictory actions and sociality.
This article presents conceptual and methodological frameworks to prioritise interventions on the Colombian Páramo. The mode of analysis that our work takes up is that of questioning value and related categories as definite empirically perceived phenomena. We contend that the valuation of ecosystem services -- even in its post-normal forms -- and the ecosystem services framework not only fail to examine value-based categories, but reproduce the problematic aspects of value-based social relations, which ultimately bear on the ecological issues affecting the Páramo. Upon this premise we set out to formalise a (computational) dialogical scenario where arguments stating distinct, and often contradictory, actions delineate possible forms of appropriating the Páramo, while motivating the examination of their defining sociality.