Towards an Ethical Consensus for Sustainable Development: An Integrative Review on the Role of Values, Morals, and Norms in Shaping Pro-Environmental Behaviour

Background: This integrative review investigates how behavioural and psychological factors shape non-market environmental valuation within the scope of sustainable development. Unlike traditional technical-economic approaches, the novelty of this work lies in reframing socio-cultural drivers of pro-environmental behaviours (PEBs) within macro sustainability paradigms and proposing a socially and ethically grounded framework. The review has three objectives: (i) to incorporate psychological and socio-cultural dimensions into the sustainable development agenda; (ii) to demonstrate how values, norms, and perceptions drive PEBs; and (iii) to call for an ethical consensus across socio-economic and environmental sustainability. Methods: The review follows PRISMA 2020 guidelines and synthesises English-language empirical and conceptual studies (2010–2025) from Scopus and Web of Science, supplemented by Google Scholar. The literature search was conducted in December 2025, and rigorous screening and exclusion criteria were applied to ensure methodological reliability. Results: The review includes 69 interdisciplinary studies and 2 reports. The synthesis yields a framework on ethics that integrates psychological, behavioural, and economic perspectives in non-market environmental valuation and informs the weak vs. strong sustainability debate. Discussion: The findings connect sustainability debates to socio-cultural theories to explain how values, norms, and perceptions shape PEBs and valuation-relevant preferences. The review is limited by its integrative (non-meta-analytic) design, which relies on qualitative synthesis and expert judgement across heterogeneous theoretical and empirical traditions; therefore, a formal risk-of-bias assessment was not conducted. The review protocol was registered on OSF (registration ID W9Y8T).