Process-guided multicriteria analysis in wastewater planning

One of the key challenges for municipalities provided by Agenda 21 is the management of water resources. A central aim of the Agenda is for municipalities to take increased responsibility for the planning of wastewater handling. This implies finding proper decisionmaking methods with which to assess and handle conflicts of interest due to the multiple criteria and multiple users. The author describes the development of a process-guided multicriteria analysis (MCA) method and discusses its use as a decisionmaking tool for wastewater planning in a Norwegian municipality. A number of alternatives and criteria considered to be relevant in the evaluation of wastewater planning were developed in a dialogue between a decisionmaker, an expert, and the author. Various techniques for the aggregation of alternatives, criteria, decisions, and actors preferences with different claims to comparability and commensurability were used. The decision actors found it easier to rank then to weigh criteria. The use of process-guided MCA in decisionmaking provides a structured way of articulating alternatives and preferences and a transparent way of showing the success and the robustness of the alternatives. The preferences were articulated after the calculation of scores, implying that the decisions were less generalisable but better informed than those achieved through prior articulation. By integrating the decision actors in the decisionmaking process, uncertainties about the relevant preferences and alternatives may have been reduced-thereby increasing the robustness of the results.