DSMM Group - Research Areas


Structuring and organizing the public decision process


Public decision-making processes are complex, because they involve interconnected policies, plans, programs and projects, and a number of stakeholders with different opinions and interests.
In these processes economy and society have always been key factors of discussion but, in the last decades,  environmental concerns and sustainability issues as well have come to the attention of citizens, administrators, and planners.
It becomes necessary to redefine the decision-making process structure, integrating environmental concerns into the process, and ensuring three essential requirements:
  • Transparency: a shared information on technical analyses and political decisions is necessary to make the interested subjects aware of what is going on.
  • Repeatability: the documentation and the software implementation of every step of the process allow to change any element (according for example to newly available information), and go through the process again.
  • Participation: it is necessary to identify and involve the interested subjects (decision-makers, stakeholders, etc.), supporting the communication with analyses and tools easy to access, understand, and use.

Considering the life cycle of a plan, our methodological framework proposes the following phases.
  1. Scoping: plan influence area is identified, preliminary analyses are performed and general principles to set up the plan activities are defined.
  2. Plan development: general objectives are identified, specific objectives and actions are defined and selected, plan alternatives are generated, their effects are determined and estimated, and the alternatives are compared to make a choice. These steps can be repeated to attain the required level of detail and operational accuracy.
  3. It is also essential to design a system to monitor the plan implementation and its effects. The monitoring activities will allow to reorient the decisions if the effects or the context are not as predicted.
Some elements characterize the entire decision-making process and are present in every phase:
  • participation, aimed at guaranteeing all interested parties the possibility to express their opinions and proposals;
  • knowledge base, which contains all the information useful for the decision-making process;
  • coherence analysis, which points out possible contradictions between policies, plans and programs, and clarifies each phase of the process.
This approach has been developed within several projects, including:
  • design, implementation and application of decision-support software tools;
  • technical support to strategic environmental assessment processes of plans at various scales;
  • assistance to negotiation processes involving multiple actors;
  • development of sustainability frameworks of complex programs.