| Title | AN INTEGRATED CONSENSUS SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR CONFLICT ANALYSIS |
| Abstract | In water resources management domain, increasing interest is posed in enhancing public participation. The importance of shared decision process in water management, derives from the awareness of the inadequacy of the traditional - engineering - approaches in dealing with complex and ill-structured problems. It's becoming increasingly obvious that the "hard" problem solving and decision support techniques, based on optimization and factual knowledge, have to be combined with "soft" stakeholders based policy design and implementation. Therefore, these two approaches are not mutually exclusive but complementary in a new and integrated view of the management schemes. The aim of our research work is the definition of an Integrated Consensus Support System (ICSS) able to support the participative decision-making process in all phases, involving the problem definition and structuring, the identification of the possible alternatives, the formulation of the participants' judgments, the consensus achievement. Furthermore, the ICSS aims at structuring, systematizing the knowledge emerged during the participative process in order to making it comprehensible for the decision-makers and functional for the decision process. Therefore, different methodologies, able to deal with different aspect of the decision process, have been considered and integrated in the System. More in detail, the Problem Structuring Methods (PSM) and the Multigroup Evaluation Methods (MEM) are applied. The PSM is used to support the stakeholders in providing their perspective of the problem and to elicit their interests and preferences. The MEM is used to define the consensus degree about each alternative, highlighting those where the agreement is high, the consensus label for each alternative and behaviour of the individuals during the participative decisionmaking (e.g. who are less in agreement and in which preferences this occurs). The ICSS is applied to a decision process regarding the use of the treated wastewater for the agricultural irrigation. This decision problem is particularly interesting for the scopes of this work because of the high level of conflicts. The strong opposition of the local community and of the farmers has hampered the implementation of this policy, causing also economic damages to the local water agency. Thus, the ICSS has been used to discover the reasons of the conflicts, eliciting the perspectives and the preferences of the other stakeholders, and to propose to the local decision maker some mitigating strategies to reduce the level of conflict. |
| Source | 2nd EGU General Assembly, Vienna (AUT), 24-29 Aprile 2005 |
| Year | 2005 |
| Type | Abstract in atti di convegno |
| Authors | GIORDANO R., PASSARELLA G., URICCHIO V.F., VURRO M. |
| Text | 119270 2005 AN INTEGRATED CONSENSUS SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR CONFLICT ANALYSIS GIORDANO R., PASSARELLA G., URICCHIO V.F., VURRO M. R. Giordano, G. Passarella, V.F. Uricchio, M. Vurro Water Research Institute I.R.S.A., Italian National Research Council C.N.R., Bari http //meetings.copernicus.org/www.cosis.net/abstracts/EGU05/08690/EGU05 J 08690.pdf Convegno internazionale organizzato da EGU, the European Geosciences Union 2nd EGU General Assembly Vienna AUT 24 29 Aprile 2005 Internazionale Contributo In water resources management domain, increasing interest is posed in enhancing public participation. The importance of shared decision process in water management, derives from the awareness of the inadequacy of the traditional engineering approaches in dealing with complex and ill structured problems. It s becoming increasingly obvious that the hard problem solving and decision support techniques, based on optimization and factual knowledge, have to be combined with soft stakeholders based policy design and implementation. Therefore, these two approaches are not mutually exclusive but complementary in a new and integrated view of the management schemes. The aim of our research work is the definition of an Integrated Consensus Support System ICSS able to support the participative decision making process in all phases, involving the problem definition and structuring, the identification of the possible alternatives, the formulation of the participants judgments, the consensus achievement. Furthermore, the ICSS aims at structuring, systematizing the knowledge emerged during the participative process in order to making it comprehensible for the decision makers and functional for the decision process. Therefore, different methodologies, able to deal with different aspect of the decision process, have been considered and integrated in the System. More in detail, the Problem Structuring Methods PSM and the Multigroup Evaluation Methods MEM are applied. The PSM is used to support the stakeholders in providing their perspective of the problem and to elicit their interests and preferences. The MEM is used to define the consensus degree about each alternative, highlighting those where the agreement is high, the consensus label for each alternative and behaviour of the individuals during the participative decisionmaking e.g. who are less in agreement and in which preferences this occurs . The ICSS is applied to a decision process regarding the use of the treated wastewater for the agricultural irrigation. This decision problem is particularly interesting for the scopes of this work because of the high level of conflicts. The strong opposition of the local community and of the farmers has hampered the implementation of this policy, causing also economic damages to the local water agency. Thus, the ICSS has been used to discover the reasons of the conflicts, eliciting the perspectives and the preferences of the other stakeholders, and to propose to the local decision maker some mitigating strategies to reduce the level of conflict. AN INTEGRATED CONSENSUS SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR CONFLICT ANALYSIS Abstract presentato a Convegno internazionale organizzato da EGU, the European Geosciences Union INT_Abstract_Poster_04.pdf Abstract in atti di convegno Copernicus GmbH 1029 7006 Geophysical research abstracts Geophysical research abstracts Geophys. res. abstr. Geophysical research abstracts. giuseppe.passarella PASSARELLA GIUSEPPE vitofelice.uricchio URICCHIO VITO FELICE raffaele.giordano GIORDANO RAFFAELE michele.vurro VURRO MICHELE TA.P04.005.008 Integrazione di metodologie per il monitoraggio e la modellizzazione per la gestione delle risorse idriche |
