Roles of Multicriteria Decision Analysis in Public Sector Strategic Planning Event

Event details

The concepts developed in this presentation arose specifically in the context of national energy planning in developing countries, taking into consideration both reaction to and mitigation of climate change. The concepts undoubtedly apply equally to other strategic natural resource planning problems. We identify three phases in such strategic planning processes: an initial identification of courses of action that can be implemented; an assembly of such actions into portfolios that constitute potential policies; and the evaluation of such policies to provide final recommendations. Each phase can be viewed as a multiple criteria decision making problem in its own right, but different MCDA mechanisms will be appropriate to each. The first has a strong problem structuring element and discrete choice MCDA applied to a sorting problematique. The second is a multiobjective portfolio optimization problem, with the aim of generating a short-list for final consideration, within which we apply multiple reference point approaches. The third phase is again a discrete choice problem aimed at choice or ranking of alternatives, often in the presence of important qualitative criteria. We shall trace the development and integration of MCDA thinking through these three phases, and the need for backtracking at times to earlier phases. The approach will be illustrated by reference to earlier work in water resources planning, with some hypothetical extensions to create a clear numerical example.