Improving tractability of group decision making on environmental problems through the use of social intensities of preferences

Natural ecosystems play an essential role in the regulation and preservation of ecological processes and life support systems on earth. This observation increases social liability towards environmental protection. In the past people had mostly economic incentives to support environmental services, nowadays there are other motives such as ecological and social (non-economic) ones for supporting these services. However, the diversity of stakeholders’ motives for environmental services is a source of conflict, which hinders natural resources managers to formulate an acceptable environmental policy. To alleviate this problem, we propose a tractable methodology to improve the acceptability of the group decision, based on the resolution of conflicts on environmental issues as one of the first steps in the methodology. The group decision aiding methodology we present is considered tractable as it reduces the number of concurrent inputs to be taken into account. It computes social intensities of preferences on environmental services to be processed by a conventional outranking method. In this way, stakeholders are able to verify that their opinion is taken into account, even if it is contrary to the majority voice. Natural resources managers who are responsible for environmental services 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. 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Software availability OSDL is available upon requesting the third author and ARGUS is available by contacting Wim De Keyser, [email protected]. SIA, Hemelstraat 90, 9200 Dendermonde, Belgium.