A key issue for sustainability planning is how to integrate economic, social and environmental concerns in the process of evaluating possible management actions. This thesis is particularly concerned with evaluating natural resource management actions. Integrated evaluation tools may assist in weighing up multi-dimensional pros and cons of each management action. These tools aid decision making in two main ways; helping a decision maker to clarify his or her thoughts and suggesting preferable management options. Many integrated evaluation tools produce a ranking of options, from most to least preferred, in order to guide the choice of a management option. They achieve this by integrating impact assessment data, on how well management options perform economically, socially and environmentally, with a decision maker’s value judgements. Multiple criteria decision analysis (MCDA) methods for example, often ask the user to specify what weight of importance each impact category should have in the appraisal of management options. If the impact data is in time series, a decision maker may be asked to consider how important future impacts are in comparison to short term impacts. The economic method of discounting future impacts is regularly utilised to aggregate a time-series of impact data. This thesis looks beyond weighting and discounting, and explores tools which may better formalise value judgements about: balancing economic, social and environmental outcomes and; intergenerational equity. Such tools may be more effective in helping a decision maker to clarify his or her thoughts and in suggesting appropriate courses of action. A water resource case study is utilised to illustrate some of the alternatives identified. A major contribution of this thesis is a new integrated evaluation method referred to as Target Ordering. The Target Ordering method was developed in order to better identify which performance outcomes are most important to stakeholders and ensure user control of tradeoffs between impact categories, while retaining simplicity. This method is based on value judgements about how important target outcomes are, rather than how important the impact categories themselves are. That is, it is an alternative to weighting methods. The Target Ordering method is also extended to allow an aggregation of data across multiple time frames. That is, to provide an alternative to discounting. There seems to be a dearth of studies comparing how effective integrated evaluation tools are for helping users to think through and articulate their own preferences and to learn about the preferences of others. This thesis draws on existing research and presents new research, such that the effectiveness of weighting and non-weighting methods on these dimensions may be examined. Two experiments were conducted where a small number of water industry professionals utilised weighting and non-weighting tools to rank a large number of water management options. The non-weighting methods include Target Ordering and a graphical tool for facilitating an intuitive evaluation of management options. These tools are respectively classified as aspirational and holistic evaluation methods. Feedback was obtained from the participants through both surveys and interviews. The survey results indicate that the Target Ordering tool was significantly more useful than weighting methods for helping participants to articulate and apply their values to the problem. In general the Target Ordering tool was easier to utilise and was said to be more intuitive by some participants. The graphical tool was found to outperform a simple weighting method in facilitating users to think through and articulate their value judgements. No differences in usefulness of the graphical method and the Target Ordering method were found. Further experimental research is needed to compare how effective weighting, aspirational and holistic methods are in facilitating learning and communication of preferences in the decision making process. / PhD Doctorate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/189513 |
| Date | January 2006 |
| Creators | Holz, Linda Maree |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://www.newcastle.edu.au/copyright.html, Copyright 2006 Linda Maree Holz |
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