A Community Decision Support System to Enhance Stakeholders’ Participation in Water Resources Management

The stakeholders’ involvement in any decision making process is a key point in the Integrated Water Management (IWM). A successful watershed management process has to be participatory, allowing the stakeholders working together to set criteria for sustainable management, to identify priorities and constraints, to evaluate possible solutions, to recommend technologies and policies, and, finally, to monitor and evaluate any possible impact. For these reasons, any kind of support for handling a fair, rational and efficient debate and for achieving agreements and compromises is strongly desirable. In this contribution, a Community Decision Support System, capable to assist individuals and groups in representing and communicating their own perspectives, is proposed. Furthermore, the system can identify conflicts among stakeholders assuming a multi-level perspective. In this research work, the definition of “fuzzy semantic distance” between the judgments expressed by each stakeholder is used as a clustering method . The resulting clusters are, then, used for a cooperative solution of the problem.