Abstract
A coherent value system and attitude towards the social and natural environment are considered to be a basic condition for the implementation of sustainable development as implicitly contained in the Rio+20 Declaration 'The Future We Want'. The importance of human values such as justice, equality, shared responsibility, empowerment, solidarity or tolerance also need to gain appeal anew because of the ongoing economic crises.
Although politicians have often taken advantage of the powerful concept of values, extensive research in this field is still lacking. The main goal of the study is to analyse the meaning of values and how their importance has changed over time.
The values under scrutiny were identified in selected national policies relating to environmental protection and sustainable development covering the period 1988-2010. The study presents a method for the operationalization of values to understand thein meaning and to obtain the first quantitative findings on changes of values in selected policies over the past two decades.
The results of the analysis revealed the absence or low representation of sustainable development values (e.g. solidarity or tolerance) which may open up a discussion on the role of values in policy-making and possibly improve new, relevant Czech policies accordingly.