Perceived Diversity of Complex Environmental Systems: Multidimensional Measurement and Synthetic Indicators

Abstract

The general attitude towards the sustainable management of environmental resources is evolving towards the implementation of 'participatory' (as opposed to the classical 'command and control') and, especially at local scale, 'bottom up' (as opposed to the classical 'top down') approaches. This progress pushes a major interest in the development and application of methodologies able to 'discover' and 'measure' how environmental systems tend to be perceived by the different Stakeholders. Due to the 'nature' of the investigated systems, often too 'complex' to be treated through a classical deterministic approach, as typical for 'hard' physical/mathematical sciences, any 'measurement' has necessarily to be multidimensional. In the present report an approach, more typical of 'soft' social sciences, is presented and applied to the analysis of the sustainable management of water resources in seven Southern and Eastern Mediterranean Watersheds. The methodology is based on the development and analysis (explorative factor analysis, multidimensional scaling) of a questionnaire and is aimed at the 'discovery' and 'measurement' of a latent multidimensional 'underlying structure' ('conceptual map'). It is the opinion of the authors, that the identification of a set of 'consistent', 'independent', 'bottom up' and 'shared' synthetic indicators (aggregated indices) could be strongly facilitated by the interpretation of the dimensions of the emerging 'underlying structure'

Combining demographic and land-use dynamics with local communities perceptions for analyzing socio-ecological systems: a case study in a mountain area of Italy

“…It is therefore relevant to know the individuals' opinion about any particular aspect of their territory (problems and potential solutions) as well as their likely behavior under future hypothetical scenarios. Thus, the development of methods and tools suitable to assess how different actors perceive complex systems is necessary (Gasparino et al 2006).…”

Some Aspects of Sustainable Development

“…Simplifying the analysis and decision-making processes needs a more synthetic expression of the indicators, so that the elaboration of an aggregated indicators' set is a continuous process unfolded at the level of some international and national organisms. Using aggregated and compatible indicators at international level for monitoring sustainability can ensure more efficiency in developing analyses and justifying the macro and microeconomic decisions, which will lead to realistic approaches of the complex problems regarding sustainable development [8]. But, other authors think that exactly the additive construction of the sustainable development indicators often express conflicting situation and make more difficult the decision-making process.…”