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Hermans, Caroline

Environmental Program

2006

Ph. D.

This dissertation explores the specificities of interdisciplinary problem-solving and the use of decision support tools to facilitate collaborative natural resource planning and decision-making. Increasingly environmental and natural resource decisions are being made by community or public groups using collaborative processes. Often these discussions are characterized by conflict, inequity, and failure. The focus of this examination was a collaborative decision-making process of a stakeholder group in the White River Watershed in Vermont. The group is making decisions about how to best manage their portion of the White River in the coming years, considering river management alternatives that integrate natural science (river system dynamics) with economics (economic costs of the management alternatives). Group members have conflicting views, objectives, goals, and perspectives of the use of their natural resources and the task was to structure group discussions to allow for productive deliberations. Structured decision-making can help quantify and ground the process. Multicriteria decision-analysis (MCDA) and conjoint analysis were used to manage the group process and explore stakeholders' preferences. The main objectives of the research were to 1) structure the group process around a framework that ensures equitable discourse; 2) provide a means for non-market valuation of natural resources; 3) allow the quantification of individuals' constructed preferences; and 4) measure changes in individuals' preferences over the group discussions. The first chapter provides a literature review of multicriteria decision analysis, one of the initial cornerstones of this research. The second chapter focuses on the collaborative process. The third chapter examines the use of conjoint analysis to elicit participants' preferences for river characteristics. The fourth chapter examines how preferences are constructed and can be modified during group processes. This research found that the current culture of environmental and natural resource decision-making benefits greatly from using quantitative tools to manage the process. It found that structuring the decision-making process increases its efficiency as it provides a vehicle to better understand the preferences of individual group members as well as the group as a whole. It found that quantifying individual and group preferences allows the degree of preference change due to the process to be measured.