Increasing environmental sustainability by incorporating stakeholders' intensities of preferences into the policy formation

In this paper a tractable methodology is presented to improve environmental sustainability by incorporating stakeholders’ intensities of preferences into the decision making process. The environmental decision making will be controversial when there is a complex issue at hand. The difficulty comes up as stakeholders cannot see how their preferences are taken into account in the policy making process. To reduce this controversy, we propose a qualitative method to elicit stakeholders’ intensities of preferences towards a set of environmental services. Subsequently, the elicited intensities of preferences are aggregated by a mathematical approach on each single criterion. Finally, a multi-criteria approach is applied to use the aggregated values across all criteria to provide the analyst with a rank order of existing alternative plans. In this way, the stakeholders are able to verify that their opinion is taken into account, even if it is contrary to the majority voice. The natural resources manager will benefit from an increased insight into the prevalent opinion on each of the criteria through the supplied social intensities of preferences, enabling a more easily communicated justification of the final decision, and an augmented tractability of the decision making process.