How Do Multi-criteria Assessments Address Landscape-level Problems? A Review of Studies and Practices

Abstract

Viewing the landscape as a spatialized social-ecological system allows identification of specific management challenges: integration of multiple views, multiple levels of organization, complex spatial-temporal patterns and uncertainties. Multi-criteria assessments (MCAs), which allow the comparison of alternative actions when multiple interests collide, are considered adequate to support landscape management. However, there is no consensus about how they should be applied and can integrate both multiple views and spatial dimension. We conducted an extensive quantitative and qualitative literature review targeting MCAs with a participatory and spatial approach. Our results suggest that (1) for sustainability assessments, participatory and spatial approaches endorse different rationales and hybrid methods are not so common; (2) within those methods, only scenario-selection methods (as opposed to design methods) can integrate spatially-explicit, spatially-implicit, place-specific, and overall values; and (3) current applications, which aggregate values ignoring their spatial and social distribution, do not coincide with the nature of landscape-management challenges. In addition, they give little importance to the structuration of information and to collective deliberation. We conclude that, in the absence of a good match between spatiality and participation, MCAs should, for now, be handled as insightful but distorted tools to explore and structure landscape-level management problems.

Identifying Suitable Bioeconomic Cluster Sites—Combining GIS-MCDA and Operational Research Methods

“…Malczewski [12] states that "MCDA provides a rich collection of techniques and procedures for structuring decision problems, and designing, evaluating and prioritizing alternative decisions." According to Allain et al [13], "the unaddressed issue of landscape-level MCDAs is strikingly the question of distribution and heterogeneity", i.e., how benefits are distributed in space, time, and between social actors. The integration of GIS and MCDA strengthens the handling of criteria that have a spatial dimension through GIS and the handling of values or preferences through MCDA [14].…”

“…The integration of GIS and MCDA strengthens the handling of criteria that have a spatial dimension through GIS and the handling of values or preferences through MCDA [14]. The combination of the two terms meets the unaddressed issue forwarded by Allain et al [13]. A GISbased MCDA (GIS-MCDA) can be defined as a process that transforms and combines geographical information and value judgments, to obtain information for decision-making [12].…”

Participatory multi-criteria decision aid: Operationalizing an integrated assessment of ecosystem services

“…The elicitation of criteria weights was conducted as an individual valuation exercise by 18 workshop participants. The weighting was carried out on a five-point Likert scale, each scale attached to a linguistic variable (this is a common approach in MCDA, see Allain et al, 2017). The answers were then normalized into numerical weighting factors between 0 and 1.…”

“…MCDA should have a strong theoretical capacity to accommodate stakeholder knowledge and conflicting objectives. Nevertheless, the inclusion of stakeholders in MCDA has generally been limited to single steps (Allain et al, 2017). The first two steps, which we summarize in this study as problem structuring, generally receive the least importance in MCDA from a participatory perspective (Langemeyer et al, 2016;Allain et al, 2017).…”

“…Accordingly, only a few studies (e.g., Bryan & Kandulu, 2011) rely on participatory approaches for the definition of evaluation criteria; in IAES this means the selection of ES is to be considered in an assessment. Usually, the evaluation criteria are introduced by researchers (Allain et al, 2017). Participatory approaches are more commonly used at the criteria performance scoring step, although often limited to a narrow circle of experts.…”