Multi-stakeholder Partnerships for Sustainability: Designing Decision-Making Processes for Partnership Capacity

Previous efforts to improve stakeholders’ involvement in planning and decision-making processes mostly put planners and decision makers as the ones who decide which solution is the best for the decision problems. In bottom-up planning and decision-making processes that supposedly involve stakeholders as much as possible, the most common practice is that when stakeholders have different preferences about the decision issues, supra decision makers such as planners and experts gather stakeholders’ preferences, and then, using their expertise and experience, decide what is the best choice for stakeholders. We approach the involvement of stakeholders in planning and decision-making not by relying on planners’ expertise but from a negotiation perspective. Previous works related to stakeholders’ negotiation mostly require stakeholders to engage in a face-to-face negotiation that seldom involves a computer system to improve the process. In this paper, we develop a negotiation system to support multi-issue and multi-stakeholder decision-making problems. In our approach, stakeholders do not directly interact with each other. Their proposals are submitted to a system that produces counter-proposals to reduce the differences among stakeholders’ proposals. Therefore, stakeholders do not exchange their preferences directly, but rather preference elicitations are mediated by the system. This approach is called computer-mediated negotiation. The system itself is based on the principle of an orthogonal strategy. Our computer-mediated negotiation protocol consists of two main phases. The first phase is the preference elicitation phase, which measures stakeholders’ utility functions. The second phase is the e-negotiation phase, in which stakeholders make their proposals and the computer system provides suggestions to improve them. To simulate real-world negotiations where stakeholders make proposals and counter-proposals in a series of negotiation rounds, we implemented the indifference curve approach to enable stakeholders to make incremental changes of their proposals during negotiation. The results from our experiment suggest that our method can produce an optimum solution for a multi-issue and multi-stakeholder decision problem by moving stakeholders’ proposals closer to one another.

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The Importance of Being Political: Emergence of a Multi-stakeholder Forum at the Lake Malili Complex, South Sulawesi

Forest and Society ◽

10.24259/fs.v4i1.7442 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 4 (1) ◽

pp. 98

Author(s):

Nurhady Sirimorok ◽

Eko Rusdianto

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Essential Element ◽

Institutional Arrangements ◽

Community Based ◽

Stakeholder Approach ◽

South Sulawesi ◽

Decision Making Processes ◽

Management Policies ◽

Multi Stakeholder ◽

Integrated Ecosystem Management

Multi-stakeholder forums are considered an essential element of landscape approaches for sustainable development and integrated ecosystem management. Such forums are widely adopted in environmental management policies and introduced as precursors for novel institutional arrangements for collective action in complex landscapes. However, while they are often held up as a mechanism for greater inclusion and representation, they can also further marginalize less powerful stakeholders. In this respect, the importance of politics in shaping the success of a multi-stakeholder forum is often overlooked. This article examines different multi-stakeholder mechanisms for governing the Lake Malili Complex in Sulawesi, Indonesia —a landscape characterized by competing land use interests and the presence of threatened endemic species. The case highlights a successful bottom-up multi-stakeholder approach that became a model for collaboration, and which was subsequently scaled up to cover the broader Lake Malili Complex area.. The research is based on longstanding participation in the politics of decision-making processes at the Lake Malili Complex, complemented by in-depth examination of the establishment of the multi-stakeholder forum. The findings show that strong, locally-based initiatives provide an avenue for generating greater participation in achieving mutual goals for conserving the Lake Malili Complex. However, participation in the multi-stakeholder platform is not enough to push for decision making at the district level, where more powerful management decisions take place. We therefore note that outcomes of community-based resource management are limited when they are not backed by more political approaches to influence decision making

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A Goal Programming Model to Guide Decision-Making Processes towards Conservation Consensuses

Sustainability ◽

10.3390/su13041959 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 (4) ◽

pp. 1959

Author(s):

Mónica de Castro-Pardo ◽

João C. Azevedo

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Goal Programming ◽

Programming Model ◽

Biosphere Reserve ◽

Conservation Areas ◽

Negotiation Strategies ◽

Relative Contribution ◽

Goal Programming Model ◽

Decision Making Processes ◽

Multi Stakeholder

In this paper we propose a goal programming model that provides a consensual aggregated solution minimizing conflicts to guide multi-stakeholder decision-making processes and generates information regarding stakeholder groups to be exploited for negotiation purposes. This model permits to quantify variations in conflicts when the relative contribution of each criteria changes and gives insight to negotiation strategies with application in conservation areas. A dataset of a case study in the Meseta Ibérica Biosphere Reserve (Portugal-Spain) was used to test and validate the model. Fifty people belonging to four groups (scientists, government, farmers and businesspersons) assessed 20 management objectives in four dimensions: conservation, logistical support, development, and governance. The results showed the highest conflicts to be found for fauna and flora, education, and guarantees objectives while the most conflictive groups were scientists and farmers. The proposed model substantially reduced the global and intergroup conflicts associated to the same objectives, modelling the weights assigned to each objective in each dimension to find the most consensual/least conflictive solutions. This model can be a useful tool to improve complex decision-making processes in conservation areas with strong conflicts between stakeholders, such as transboundary biosphere reserves.

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A Multi-Criteria Framework for Pandemic Response Measures

Frontiers in Public Health ◽

10.3389/fpubh.2021.583706 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 9 ◽

Author(s):

Love Ekenberg ◽

Adriana Mihai ◽

Tobias Fasth ◽

Nadejda Komendantova ◽

Mats Danielson

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Risk Mitigation ◽

Point Of View ◽

Mitigation Measures ◽

Response Strategies ◽

Management Measures ◽

Relevant Stakeholder ◽

Decision Making Processes ◽

Multi Stakeholder ◽

National Governments

In managing the COVID-19 pandemic, several compelling narratives seem to have played a significant role in the decision-making processes regarding which risk mitigation and management measures to implement. Many countries were to a large extent unprepared for such a situation, even though predictions about a significant probability for a pandemic to occur existed, and national governments of several countries often acted in an uncoordinated manner, which resulted in many inconsistencies in the disaster risk reduction processes. Limited evidence has also made room for strategic narratives meant to persuade the public of the chosen set of actions, even though the degree of uncertainty regarding the outcomes of these was high, further complicating the situation. In this article, we assume a normative standpoint regarding rhapsodic decision making and suggest an integrated framework for a more elaborated decision analysis under the ambiguity of how to contain the virus spread from a policy point of view, while considering epidemiologic estimations and socioeconomic factors in a multi-stakeholder-multi-criteria context based on a co-creative work process for eliciting attitudes, perceptions, as well as preferences amongst relevant stakeholder groups. The framework, applied in our paper on Romania for demonstrative purposes, is used for evaluating mitigation measures for catastrophic events such as the COVID-19 situation, to mobilize better response strategies for future scenarios related to pandemics and other hazardous events, as well as to structure the production and analysis of narratives on the current pandemic effects.

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Cognitive Processing of Miscommunication in Interactive Listening: An Evaluation of Listener Indecision and Cognitive Effort

Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research ◽

10.1044/2020_jslhr-20-00128 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-17

Author(s):

Jennifer M. Roche ◽

Arkady Zgonnikov ◽

Laura M. Morett

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Cognitive Processing ◽

Language Processing ◽

Cognitive Effort ◽

Mouse Tracking ◽

Computer Mouse ◽

Decision Making Processes ◽

Computer Mouse Tracking ◽

Listening Task ◽

Processing Effort

Purpose The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the social and cognitive underpinnings of miscommunication during an interactive listening task. Method An eye and computer mouse–tracking visual-world paradigm was used to investigate how a listener's cognitive effort (local and global) and decision-making processes were affected by a speaker's use of ambiguity that led to a miscommunication. Results Experiments 1 and 2 found that an environmental cue that made a miscommunication more or less salient impacted listener language processing effort (eye-tracking). Experiment 2 also indicated that listeners may develop different processing heuristics dependent upon the speaker's use of ambiguity that led to a miscommunication, exerting a significant impact on cognition and decision making. We also found that perspective-taking effort and decision-making complexity metrics (computer mouse tracking) predict language processing effort, indicating that instances of miscommunication produced cognitive consequences of indecision, thinking, and cognitive pull. Conclusion Together, these results indicate that listeners behave both reciprocally and adaptively when miscommunications occur, but the way they respond is largely dependent upon the type of ambiguity and how often it is produced by the speaker.

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“It's Not Humanly Possible to Do Everything”: Perspectives on Intervention Decision-Making Processes of Parents of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Perspectives on Language Learning and Education ◽

10.1044/lle22.1.13 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 22 (1) ◽

pp. 13-21 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Erinn Finke ◽

Kathryn Drager ◽

Elizabeth C. Serpentine

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Individualized Education Program ◽

Children With Autism ◽

Autism Spectrum ◽

Sources Of Information ◽

Individual Decision ◽

Decision Making Processes ◽

Spectrum Disorders ◽

Interview Methodology ◽

Communication Interventions

Purpose The purpose of this investigation was to understand the decision-making processes used by parents of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) related to communication-based interventions. Method Qualitative interview methodology was used. Data were gathered through interviews. Each parent had a child with ASD who was at least four-years-old; lived with their child with ASD; had a child with ASD without functional speech for communication; and used at least two different communication interventions. Results Parents considered several sources of information for learning about interventions and provided various reasons to initiate and discontinue a communication intervention. Parents also discussed challenges introduced once opinions of the school individualized education program (IEP) team had to be considered. Conclusions Parents of children with ASD primarily use individual decision-making processes to select interventions. This discrepancy speaks to the need for parents and professionals to share a common “language” about interventions and the decision-making process.

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