Use of multicriteria involvement processes to enhance transparency and stakeholder participation at Bergen Harbor, Norway

Abstract

Use of participatory stakeholder engagement processes could be important to reduce the risk of potential conflicts in managing contaminated sites. Most stakeholder engagement techniques are qualitative in nature and require experienced facilitators. This study proposes a multicriteria involvement process to enhance transparency and stakeholder participation and applies it to a contaminated sediment management case study for Bergen Harbor, Norway. The suggested multicriteria involvement process builds on the quantitative principles of multicriteria decision analysis and also incorporates group interaction and learning through qualitative participatory methods. Three different advisory groups consisting of local residents, local stakeholders, and nonresident sediment experts were invited to participate in a stakeholder engagement process to provide consensual comparative advice on sediment remediation alternatives. In order for stakeholders or residents to be able to embrace a complex decision such as selection of remediation alternatives, the involvement process with lateral learning, combined with multicriteria decision analysis providing structure, robustness and transparent documentation was preferable. In addition, a multicriteria involvement process resulted in consistent ranking of remediation alternatives across residents, stakeholder, and experts, relative to individual intuitive ranking without the multicriteria involvement process. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2011;7:414–425. © 2011 SETAC

Enhanced Adaptive Management: Integrating Decision Analysis, Scenario Analysis and Environmental Modeling for the Everglades

“…First, the objectives that the adaptive management is designed to accomplish must be specified, as well as those metrics that best inform those objectives. Specific cases have documented how utilization of decision analytic tools enhanced stakeholder participation, including the case of Bergen Harbor55. Second, the relative importance of different objectives, expressed as weights, must be identified.…”

Use of Multicriteria Decision Analysis to Support Weight of Evidence Evaluation

“…Aldenberg et al ( 15 ) use statistically‐based WOE techniques to assess relevance of several genotoxicity tests to chemical carcinogenicity predictions. Alvarez‐Guerra et al ( 16 ) and Sparrevik et al ( 17 ) use MCDA to evaluate remedial alternatives for sediment management across different criteria, including environmental, economic, and social, utilizing values from multiple stakeholders. One reason for lack of application of quantitative methods could be that such methods require additional resources and analytical rigor.…”

A Framework for Multiobjective Decision Management with Diverse Stakeholders

“…Stakeholder theory originated in the fields of management and business ethics in the 1980s to address ethical and effective management of corporate constituencies [Freeman, ; Parmar et al., ]. Stakeholder theory has since been applied to strategy making, policy making, and large systems design; for example, engineering project management [Karlsen, ; Newcombe, ; Bourne and Walker, ; Walker, Bourne, and Shelley, ; Yang et al., ], watershed improvement [Merrick et al., ], innovation development [Vos and Achterkamp, ], uncertainty management [Ward and Chapman, ], enterprise architecture [van der Raadt et al., ], global projects [Aaltonen and Kujala, ], water resource management [Keller, Kirkwood, and Jones, ], nanotechnology regulation [Hansen, ], contamination management [Sparrevik et al., ], megaproject management [Eweje, Turner, and Müller, ], hydropower project assessment [Rosso et al., ], space systems architecture [Golkar and Crawley, ], software requirements engineering [Jiang et al., ; Lim and Finkelstein, ; Babar et al., ], portfolio analysis [Ewing, Tarantino, and Parnell, ], and tradeoffs between economic and environmental objectives [Gregory and Keeney, ].…”