In this action research project, a multimethodology (MM) approach for planning community development projects (CDPs) is proposed. The MM approach is composed of four planning stages; three Soft OR approaches; and a theoretical framework for sustainable community development. The aim of the research is to examine MM’s potential benefits in facilitating group planning and decisionmaking within the context of a particular CDP in Colombia. Thus, the research centres attention on illustrating a theoretical informed way for designing MMs and a systematic procedure for evaluating their impacts in practice. A case study is undertaken in order to evaluate MM’s benefits in a real-world situation. It unfolds within the context of a Colombian governmental project that seeks to improve the socioeconomic conditions of a group of families living in a deprived community in Colombia. MM is employed in order to assist an organisation to design ideas for new business units for some of the families of this community. The case study entails dealing with different complexities and difficulties, including with a decision-team that had highly deteriorated working relations between its members. The results suggest that the main benefits of MM were not only related to clarifying and structuring the content of the problem, but also to improving the quality of the social interactions between the members of this conflicting team. Hence, it seems that MMs might facilitate decision-teams to deal with some of the most common complexities that can be found in CDP-related problems, such as: assessing trade-offs between multiple community’s dimensions, managing uncertainty, etc., as well as facilitate the negotiation process of conflicting ideas and improve the quality of the CDPs planned by them. In this regard, this research aims to be able to contribute to the literature in MM and Community OR (i.e. OR for community development).
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:536252 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Piza, Juan Felipe Henao |
| Publisher | University of Warwick |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/35551/ |
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