A methodology for interactive decision making in environmental management involving multiple stakeholders

Abstract

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Nuclear Engineering, 1998."September 1997." Vita.Includes bibliographical references (p. 124-132).A methodology for evaluating environmental management programs using integrated risk communication, assessment and management tools is developed. The main novelty of the methodology lies in the use of decision analysis methods to integrate the wide range of decision objectives which characterize environmental management problems, and risk assessment for impact evaluations under uncertainty, in a framework that emphasizes and incorporates input from stakeholders in all aspects of the process. The outcomes of the analysis are then used to guide the behavioural deliberative process that is engaged to reach a consensual, defensible decision. The first step of the methodology is that of identifying all consequences relevant to the implementation of the decision, i.e. the performance measures. These are identified through a decomposition process based on the use of conditional influence diagrams which allow to incorporate and structure the quantitative a1.1d qualitative issues of the decision problem. Aggregation of the evaluations of the performance measures is done by means of an additive utility function in which single-attribute utilities for the various performance measures are weighed by appropriate measures of their relative importance. The weights of the performance measures are assessed by the pairwise comparison method of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) applied to the hierarchical structure of the influence diagram. For the determination of the single-attribute utilities we employ a novel approach based on the AHP in which the comparisons are made not on the actual numerical values of the performance measures but, rather, on more intuitive concepts such as 'worst', 'moderate' and 'best'. Within this approach, the innovative introduction of elements of fuzzy logic allows us to account for linguistic imprecision in the expression of the stakeholders' preferences ...by Enrico Zio.Ph.D