Individual and Social Preferences in Participatory Multi-Criteria Evaluation

Decisions on environmental issues are complex and multidimensional as they represent multiple interests and values. Nevertheless, the ability of participatory multi-criteria methodologies to deal with this kind of problem is widely acknowledged. Traditionally, multi-criteria methods have focused more on technical issues than on the representation of participants’ preferences. In participatory processes there are questions such as who establishes the mechanisms of participation, in what terms these processes are developed and who is going to participate, which are determining factors that have not been sufficiently studied in multi-criteria analysis. This paper, in order to shed light on this gap, aims to compare the creation of social preferences under two different participatory approaches. For this purpose, two different participatory approaches are compared. On the one hand, applying the social multi-criteria evaluation (SMCE) method, a deliberative process is developed following the principles of deliberative democracy. On the other hand, an aggregation process of individual preferences has been developed based on information collected through surveys. Both approaches have advantages as well as constraints. Our main finding is that the information obtained through the different participatory methods is different and complementary. Therefore, we can state that both participatory methods can be enriching assessment processes.