Multiple-Criteria Evaluation in Environmental Policy Analysis

When a public policy needs to be implemented, there is a need of comparing different options and valuating and evaluating them to assess their social attractiveness. Each policy option is often characterized by conflicts between competing values, perspectives, interests and different groups and communities that represent them. In fact, economic development implies the creation of new assets in terms of physical, social and economic structures. Within such a process of “creative destruction” traditional environmental, social, and cultural assets derived from a society’s common heritage may disappear. A first requirement for public policies to be considered fair is thus the respect of value pluralism. The basic idea of multi-criteria evaluation is that in evaluation problems, one has first to establish objectives, i.e. the direction of the desired changes of the world (e.g. maximize profits, minimize environmental impact, minimize social exclusion, etc.) and then find useful practical criteria, which indicate the consistency between a policy option and a given objective. The main achievement of Social Multi-Criteria Evaluation (SMCE) is the fact that the use of various evaluation criteria has a direct translation in terms of plurality of values and dimensions used in the evaluation exercise. SMCE accomplishes the goals of being inter/multi-disciplinary (with respect to the research team), participatory (with respect to the community) and transparent (since all criteria are presented in their original form without any transformations in money, energy or whatever common measurement rod).JRC.I.1-Modelling, Indicators and Impact Evaluatio