Making decisions by integrating social and environmental concerns beyond the financial dimension involves complex decision-making processes in which innovative approaches and best practices need to be implemented. Recently, the literature on decision-making related to sustainable development has grown rapidly, and multiple criteria decision making or analysis (MCDM/A) methods appear to be the most widely used approaches. The general objective of this paper is to provide a systematic review of the literature on the use of MCDM/A in a sustainable development context. We carefully analysed 343 papers dealing with decision-making in sustainable development contexts published in the last 7 years (2010-2017) using MCDM/A methods. Descriptive statistics were provided to highlight the main trends and gaps in the literature, and future research avenues were presented. The results show that although sustainable development strives to achieve a balance between the short and the long term, most articles surveyed did not investigate either the long-term perspective related to sustainable development or the unforeseen events that could impact future project evaluations. Indeed, the need for temporal MCDM/A methods under uncertainty emerges as an important research challenge. In addition, resultsshow that the social dimension was the most frequently ignored dimension. In future research, decision-making processes should closely investigate social well-being and encourage the participation of stakeholders (including the communities affected).Finally, the recent research on sustainability is relatively easy to implement but may not lead to the desired outcome. Future research needs to develop methods that promote sustainability without being overly difficult to implement in practice. KEYWORDS multicriteria decision making or analysis (MCDM/A), sustainable development, temporal evaluation, uncertainty 1 | INTRODUCTION Today's decision-making processes evolve in a context in which sustainability is a major concern and decisions have to be made based on the triple bottom line. Decision processes should simultaneously take into account the economic, social, and environmental impacts of decisions within a long-term vision. Making decisions beyond the financial dimension by integrating social and environmental concerns involves complex decision-making processes in which innovative approaches and best practices need to be developed and implemented.As a major societal concern, sustainable development (SD) is now incorporated into the legislation of many countries around the world.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.