Despite rapid advancements in the development of non-monetary techniques for the assessment of social values for ecosystem services, little research attention has been devoted to the evaluation of their underpinning paradigms. This study evaluates two contrasting paradigms for the assessment of...

This paper compares the historic German discourse on forest functions with the current international debate on ecosystem services and analyzes the factors that may have triggered or inhibited the development and the institutionalization of both underlying concepts and subordinate debates....