Participatory multi-criteria analysis methods: Comprehensive, inclusive, transparent and user-friendly? An application to the case of the London Gateway Port

Abstract

The topic of how major transport projects should be assessed continues to generate disputes amongst academics, infrastructure specialists, investors and governments alike. Over the past decades, an increasing number of scholars have started to regard participatory multi-criteria analysis (MCA) as an approach capable of producing more comprehensive, transparent and democratic assessments than traditional appraisal techniques. However, whereas a number of participatory MCA methods have been devised, the large majority of them seem to have enjoyed limited practical application and there are very few studies examining their effectiveness. In order to assess the presumed benefits and the potential drawbacks of such methods, this paper considers the case of the London Gateway Port and compares the actual planning and decisionmaking process of this port development programme with the results of a multi-actor multi-criteria appraisal exercise, involving several project stakeholders and experts. As a result of this analysis, the paper contends that the contribution that participatory MCA procedures can potentially provide to the improvement of decision-making for large-scale transport infrastructure seems limited at best.

Standard Transport Appraisal Methods

“…Lastly, eliciting weights from stakeholder groups having different agendas will unavoidably lead to clashing weighting schemes and any attempt to reconcile these differences (through negotiation or, more simply, by calculating the average of a wide spectrum of values) may easily result in deadlocks of the process 2020b). Chadwick (1971:276) summarizes the situation as follows: group weighting is a process that is not only difficult but also "theoretically impossible […].…”

“…The most well-known methods are briefly summarised in Table 9. As it is noticeable from this table, however, it is not totally clear whether these techniques have enjoyed real-world applications or constitute mere academic proposals and how they fit (or would fit) with the current, conventional planning procedures, (analyst-led) appraisal and evaluation methods and public inquiry processes 2020b).…”

“…For example, individual interviews prevent interactions and discussions between the different participants and groups. However, they enable a more thorough investigation of each participant's interests and priorities, whilst avoiding groupthink (Dean, 2020b). In the attempt to facilitate the processes and generate some fruitful discussions, some methods (e.g.…”

“…So far, only a couple of studies aimed at investigating (objectively) the strength and weaknesses of such methods (rather than promoting them) have been published. These studies, undertaken by Dean and colleagues (2019) and Dean (2020b), have aroused doubts regarding many of the presumed benefits of participatory MCA techniques (see also . These studies have shown, in particular, that participants may experience difficulties in formulating meaningful objectives and criteria, so that the direct involvement of stakeholders and experts in the appraisal or evaluation exercise may not necessarily increase the breadth of the assessment compared to a purely analyst-led approach to MCA.…”

“…A very rigorous approach to scoring involves the use of a value function to translate the impacts of the options against the various criteria into the selected measurement scale. More often, however, especially in the case of simplistic MCA applications, where time and resources to undertake the analysis are limited, a direct rating approach to scoring is adopted (Dean, 2020b). This approach simply uses an expert judgement to assign a value on a given scale (typically a Likert-type scale, which is often incorrectly used as an interval scale) to account for the impacts of an option against each criterion.…”