e-Participation and Decision Analysis

Decision analytic methods are now used frequently to help articulate and structure debate and deliberations among citizens and stakeholders in societal decisions. Methods vary, but, essentially, a public authority or agency, when faced with a significant set of issues, may organise one or more workshops with stakeholders and citizens as participants. During these, many perspectives are discussed and a decision model or family of models built to explore the balance of the uncertainties and various objectives. The outputs of the workshops are used by the authorities to guide their decision making, sometimes purely as inputs, other times as a morally, if not legally binding determination of the way forward. Such methods of public engagement and participation are, by and large, conducted face-toface. However, the advent of the World Wide Web brings the possibility of conducting citizen and stakeholder interactions in a distributed, possibly asynchronous fashion. We discuss the many pitfal...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: DA
• Authors: Simon French, David Ríos Insua, Fabrizio Ruggeri
• Keywords: DA 2007, Decision Analytic Methods, Significant Set, Societal Decisions