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Use of Multi-criteria Decision Aid in Environmental Managementby and The Role of Trust in Legitimating Stakeholder Participationby Wednesday, November 3, 2004
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Use of Multi-criteria Decision Aid in Environmental Management Risto Lahdelma Summary: In environmental planning and decision processes several alternatives must be evaluated in terms of multiple non-commensurate criteria, and a choice must be made considering the points of view of many different stakeholders with conflicting preferences. Environmental problems are also difficult, because much of the associated information can be highly imprecise or uncertain. We discuss how multicriteria decision aid (MCDA) methods can be used successfully in such processes and introduce the Stochastic Multicriteria Acceptability Analysis (SMAA) methods that we have been developed in particular for such processes. Advantages of SMAA are that it can combine flexibly various kinds of high and low quality information, it can be used with weak assumptions on the decision-makers’ preference structure, and it can produce descriptive results even with absent preference information. Biography: Prof. Lahdelma has performed original research and consulted in the areas of optimization, software engineering, and multicriteria decision support with applications in energy management, production planning, and environmental management. His recent work includes development of the Stochastic Multicriteria Acceptability Analysis (SMAA) methods that have been applied in public environmental decision problems. His publications have appeared in Decision Support Systems, Environmental Management, European Journal of Operational Research, Forest Science, Journal of Environmental Management, Journal of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis, Operations Research, and Socio-Economic Planning Sciences. Currently he is professor of Computer Science at University of Turku (2000-), Finland. Previously he has been research professor at the Technical Research Center of Finland (97-), associate professor at University of Jyväskylä (94-), project manager at Helsinki University of Technology (90-), and team manager at Nokia (85-). He has received his MSc (1985) and PhD (1994) from Helsinki University of Technology. The Role of Trust in Legitimating Stakeholder Participation Will Focht Summary: It is now widely acknowledged that stakeholder participation is important in environmental decision-making and especially so in watershed management contexts. However, little agreement exists on when and how this participation should occur. This presentation addresses three topics. It begins with a normative defense of proposed substantive and procedural criteria for legitimated stakeholder participation. This is followed by a defense of the claim that trust is an essential determinant of stakeholders’ participation expectations. The presentation will close with an empirically-tested prescriptive model for selecting legitimated stakeholder participation strategies. These topics are treated extensively in chapters 3 and 4 in a book entitled, Swimming Upstream: Collaborative Approaches to Watershed Management, which will be published next spring.
Biography: Dr. Focht is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Oklahoma State University. He also directs the Oklahoma Water Resources Research Institute Stillwater and Environmental Institute in Stillwater, Oklahoma. His research interests include environmental policy legitimacy and social trust; political participation; social constructions of risk; conflict assessment and policy dialogue; community relations and risk communication; watershed management planning; integrated risk analysis; environmental site characterization. |
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