Design of Decision Support for Stakeholder-Driven Collaborative Land Valuation

First Nations treaty negotiations and land-claim settlements require the valuation of large areas of land for diverse land uses, including usage which is difficult to quantify in absolute or monetary terms. The authors report an attempt to develop a methodology for seeking consensus on land values for the latter land-use activities, using Gestalt valuation. They offer an alternative to planner-driven land valuation, placing the valuation responsibility instead on stakeholders. The methodology is justified and explained. The authors introduce different types of decision-support information products that can be derived to facilitate consensus building. They summarise experience gained in an evaluation of the proposed methodological procedure, in which university students were used as a sample. They conclude that computing technology has advanced sufficiently to make it reasonably straightforward to collect information about individual stakeholders' land valuations, and that the resultant information can be packaged effectively in a collaborative spatial decision support system to facilitate consensus building. Ongoing research is introduced.