Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

Multicriteria evaluation (MCE) is a well-tried and effective procedure for structuring and aiding complex decisionmaking processes, especially those involving environmental considerations. Formal deliberative processes have also been successful in aiding understanding and meeting consensus in complex and difficult decision problems which involve more than one decisionmaker. Here, both approaches are combined in a new technique called ‘deliberative multicriteria evaluation’ to assist a group of natural resource managers to decide on a suitable option for recreation and tourism activities in the upper Goulburn–Broken Catchment of Victoria, Australia. This approach is an attempt to combine the advantages of MCE, providing structure and integration in complex decision problems, with the advantages of deliberation and stakeholder interaction provided by a ‘citizens' jury’. An important outcome of the process was the discovery of some crucial aspects of the decision problem that required deeper understanding and assessment if that preferred strategy were to have the desired results. Some suggestions for improving the process are provided but, in general, the stakeholder jury was regarded as a helpful and useful procedure by the decisionmakers and one which aided them in their understanding of the issues of a complex decisionmaking problem.

One of the key challenges for municipalities provided by Agenda 21 is the management of water resources. A central aim of the Agenda is for municipalities to take increased responsibility for the planning of wastewater handling. This implies finding proper decisionmaking methods with which to assess and handle conflicts of interest due to the multiple criteria and multiple users. The author describes the development of a process-guided multicriteria analysis (MCA) method and discusses its use as a decisionmaking tool for wastewater planning in a Norwegian municipality. A number of alternatives and criteria considered to be relevant in the evaluation of wastewater planning were developed in a dialogue between a decisionmaker, an expert, and the author. Various techniques for the aggregation of alternatives, criteria, decisions, and actors preferences with different claims to comparability and commensurability were used. The decision actors found it easier to rank then to weigh criteria. The use of process-guided MCA in decisionmaking provides a structured way of articulating alternatives and preferences and a transparent way of showing the success and the robustness of the alternatives. The preferences were articulated after the calculation of scores, implying that the decisions were less generalisable but better informed than those achieved through prior articulation. By integrating the decision actors in the decisionmaking process, uncertainties about the relevant preferences and alternatives may have been reduced—thereby increasing the robustness of the results.

The Water Framework Directive institutionalises participatory processes in river basin planning across the European Union. This paper reports on three case studies from southern Europe where conflicts over water exist. In each a different method for participation was experimentally employed: scenario workshops, mediated modelling, and social multicriteria evaluation. Scenario workshops and mediated modelling proved well suited to the early stages of a planning process (problem solving and identification of goals and alternatives) and to be good at educating participants and supporting capacity building. Their performance was less satisfactory with respect to resolving long-standing conflicts and achieving consensus. In comparison, social multicriteria evaluation was better able to address the evaluation of alternatives, reveal trade-offs, and aid convergence between divergent stakeholders' views, but it relied more heavily on experts and allowed less participation and deliberation in goal-setting than the other two methods. These results show complementarities amongst methods which imply that hybrid or combined approaches would be best for aiding the water planning process. They also reveal problems confronting the use of participatory approaches and constraints which prevent theoretical promise from being converted into practical results.

Integrated assessment of decisions under uncertainty for sustainable development (IANUS) is a method for aiding public decisionmaking that supports efforts towards sustainable development and has a wide range of applications. We introduce the main features of IANUS and illustrate the method by using the results of a case study in the Torgau region (eastern Germany) with conflicts over economic development and groundwater protection in the Elbe River basin. IANUS structures the decision process into four steps: scenario derivation, criteria selection, modelling, and evaluation. Its overall aim is to support the finding of policy solutions in a participatory setting and to extract the information needed for a sound, responsible decision in a clear, transparent manner. The method is designed for use in conflict situations where environmental and socioeconomic effects need to be considered and so an interdisciplinary approach is required. Special emphasis is placed on a broad perception and consideration of uncertainty. Three types of uncertainty are explicitly taken into account by IANUS: development uncertainty (uncertainty about the social, economic and other developments that affect the consequences of decision), model uncertainty (uncertainty associated with the prediction of the effects of decisions), and weight uncertainty (uncertainty about the appropriate weighting of the criteria). The backbone of IANUS is a multicriteria method with the ability to process uncertain information. In the case study the multicriteria method PROMETHEE is used. As PROMETHEE in its basic versions is not able to process uncertain information an extension of this method is developed here and described in detail. One methodological lesson to be learned from the experience of the case study reads that the design of the participation process must be planned and executed carefully to prevent important stakeholders backing out of the participatory evaluation process—as happened with the decisionmakers in the Torgau case study.

Multiple criteria decision analysis (MCA) has become an indispensable tool for dealing with complex and unstructured decision problems in environmental and natural resource management which involve a number of conflicting objectives and a variety of stakeholders. Despite their popularity, choosing which of the many multicriteria methods to use is tricky. Different methods may yield different results and therefore the decision may depend on the method selected. In this paper we review a number of experiments conducted to compare the results of different MCA methods when applied to the same decision problem. I compare and critically examine the hypotheses postulated and the results obtained from these experiments. Despite the equivocal results yielded in some experiments, many authors recommend applying two or more MCA methods, especially in the case of unstructured decision problems. This multimethod MCA application may be regarded as a type of validation which is more extensive than standard sensitivity analysis and which enables the decisionmaker to review the preferences and judgments previously elicited by a single method.

The author analyses the scope and limits of the policy autonomy devolved to the Welsh Assembly Government (WAG). He engages with James Mitchell's application of Ted Lowi's seminal analysis of ‘policy types’ to Scottish devolution. These concepts are used to frame a case study of Welsh early childhood education and care (ECEC), demonstrating extensive innovation in Wales concerning the form of ECEC and its impact on compulsory schooling. However, there is some evidence that innovation in the form of ECEC has not been matched by sufficient increases in spending. Although echoing Mitchell's account of the fiscal limits to devolution, the author suggests a greater scope for policy innovation than Mitchell detects. The discrepancy suggests that there is room for refinement of the ‘policy-types’ framework, to draw attention to ‘regulatory’ aspects of public service provision; it may also hint that, although formally weaker, the WAG has more potential for policy innovation than the Scottish Executive.

The distribution of public investment within federal states is often subject to significant political discretion. Yet one of the possible consequences of such discretion is the appearance of path dependency in the way in which public investment is distributed. Mexico offers a unique example of the effect of path dependency in resource allocation, as there has been no political competition over more than seventy years. The authors seek to examine the dynamic structure of the regional distribution of public investment empirically, to test for the existence of path dependency and the influence of the different federal governments in Mexico. They use time-series intervention analysis methodology to study the structure of, and the influence of government change in the allocation of, public investment in Mexico between 1971 and 1999. Findings suggest the existence of path dependency in the distribution of public investment in Mexico during all except for the most recent governments. In other words, federal government change made little difference to the way in which public investment was allocated. Path dependency was only broken in the 1990s, coinciding with the setting up of the North American economic integration process, which in turn led to the loss of public support for the single political party, the Partido Revolitcionario Institucional or PRI, which had been in power in Mexico over the last seventy years.