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Abstract
Healthy growth towards sustainability requires evaluation methods that incorporate ecological and economic effects. Evaluating ecological effects in monetary terms would permit the use of Cost-Benefit Analysis. Major methodological difficulties hamper use of this approach. In this paper an alternative evaluation method is used. The method consists of a Multicriteria Analysis (MCA), in which the different aspects of nature conservation projects can be evaluated in their own terms. The net result of the monetarised effects is part of a CBA that is integrated as one of the criteria. This framework is applied to a major, publicly financed nature conservation project in the Netherlands. The project is based on a fixed budget and a fixed area in which nature can be produced using different methods. In this project, apart from analysing the net results, besides the net results of a CBA, only one other criterion is analysed: the production of nature. In this way, the concept is reduced to a straightforward analysis of the performance (cost-effectiveness) of the different methods used to produce natural environment.