Increasing social support for environmental decision making by discursive ordinal multi-criteria valuation = Versterken van de maatschappelijke steun voor mileubesluitvorming door deliberatieve ordinale multicriteria waardering

Sustainability is a matter of the distribution of resources across generations besides other aspects. In other words, future generations should be able to enjoy from endowment of natural resources at least as much as the current generation. Societies do overexploit natural resources because of imperfect markets in the context of environmental services. To overcome this problem, environmental economists are working on different methods for valuing resources. Environmental valuation is a key tool to elicit stakeholders preferences based on a hypothetical market. However, measuring stakeholders’ preferences is not always very straightforward. It might be that respondents are not sure about their preferences, unable to state them exactly, or even are unaware of them. Furthermore, the respondents may hold lexicographic preferences that hinder them to make trade-offs between environmental services and market products. To reduce the valuation difficulties and in order to take into account multiple stakeholders interests and lexicographic preferences, this study proposes a new valuation approach that is consistently linked to a decision support system to help policy makers to use stakeholders’ preferences to formulate a reasonable decision. Our methodology is a discursive ordinal multi-criteria valuation method that is a combination of three following steps. Firstly a discursive step which allows stakeholders to come together to discuss on a specific environmental problem, related criteria and finally some applicable plans. This step provides an opportunity for stakeholders to construct their preferences towards environmental criteria. Secondly, to elicit the constructed preferences, stakeholders should follow an ordinal procedure. This ordinal process helps stakeholders to express their preferences and their intensities in an easy way. Finally, a purely qualitative Multi- Criteria Decision Aid (MCDA) is applied to incorporate the aggregated preferences over all criteria to formulate a rank order of the environmental plans proposed in the first step.

Jaar van publicatie:2008

Toegankelijkheid:Open