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Abstract
In this paper a tractable methodology is presented to improve environmental
sustainability by incorporating stakeholders’ intensities of preferences into the decision
making process. The environmental decision making will be controversial when there is a
complex issue at hand. The difficulty comes up as stakeholders cannot see how their
preferences are taken into account in the policy making process. To reduce this
controversy, we propose a qualitative method to elicit stakeholders’ intensities of
preferences towards a set of environmental services. Subsequently, the elicited intensities
of preferences are aggregated by a mathematical approach on each single criterion.
Finally, a multi-criteria approach is applied to use the aggregated values across all criteria
to provide the analyst with a rank order of existing alternative plans. In this way, the
stakeholders are able to verify that their opinion is taken into account, even if it is
contrary to the majority voice. The natural resources manager will benefit from an
increased insight into the prevalent opinion on each of the criteria through the supplied
social intensities of preferences, enabling a more easily communicated justification of the
final decision, and an augmented tractability of the decision making process.