A Multidimensional And Participatory Approach For Green Buildings Assessment

The development of complex decision making processes has encouraged the involvement of different stakeholders in the evaluation procedures and tools. Multi-criteria evaluations are increasingly being used in deliberative evaluation process, addressing research experiences and applications towards this new challenge: to give a broader and stronger meaning and consistency to the outcomes of the decision making process. It means to open the decisional arena to different groups with different points of view and involve multiple weights in the multicriteria evaluation framework. Itís widely acknowledged that the need for evaluation tools aiding the complex decisions comes from the consciousness about uncertainty (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1994), that requires to focus more on the process than on the outcomes. According to these general assumptions, the paper gives a critical review of assessment methods and tools developed in the field of the performance assessment of buildingsí sustainability by the Green Building Challenge (GBC) process ñ launched by Natural Resources Canada in 1996 and managed by the International Initiative for a Sustainable Built Environment (iiSBE) in 2002 ñ in order to point out 1) their strenghts and weaknesses and 2) to understand the opportunities to adapt their evaluation framework to the principles of deliberative multicriteria evaluation (Proctor, Drechsler 2006). With reference to the outcomes of this analysis, the paper suggest to enforce the followings issues of the last version of Green Building evaluation tools, called Sustainable Building Tool (SBTool): the evaluation process, the choice of criteria and the weighting system. More in deep, the analysis highlights that weights assignment is the most critical stage, because it is based on preferences and priorities of some decision-makers only (experts, technicians and institutional ones), involved with the task of adapting the generic evaluation framework to the conditions of different context in various regions by tuning values and weights. To solve this criticism itís important involve other stakeholders in the weighting stage, using specific participatory rules, in order to make the weights assignment as transparent as possible and to strengthen the legitamicy of decisions taken (Munda 2004).