Decision Analysis in Situations with Conflicting Interests

Sammanfattning: Decision problems in participatory decision making involve multiple stakeholders, who often have conflicting preferences concerning the actions under consideration. Decision problems such as these can be structured as multi-criteria problems, which enables the actions to be evaluated in terms of more than one single criterion. In these situations, the complexity of the problem increases when the objective is to select a portfolio of actions. Another aspect to take into consideration is that the choice of actions often has a long-term impact on the lives of the stakeholders. It is therefore not surprising that these problems often are sources of costly and time-consuming conflicts.This thesis presents artifacts in the form of methods and applications aiding the decision maker in participatory decision making problems in highlighting stakeholder conflict. The artifacts are DANCE, XPLOR, POLA, and SENS. DANCE is a framework of methods that are used to elicit preferences, and to measure and analyze conflicts between and within stakeholder groups regarding the performance of an action. The framework uses three novel artifacts: i) CAR-CE a method for preference elicitation, ii) two indices, one for measuring the conflict within one stakeholder group, one for measuring the conflict between two stakeholder groups, and iii) an approach to portfolio optimisation and robustness analysis. XPLOR is a web-application that is used to explore and visualise stakeholder conflicts. POLA is a web-application for evaluating commercial development policy in cooperation with key stakeholders. The last artifact, SENSE, is a method for sensitivity analysis of portfolios.The artifact development followed the design science methodology, where the aim of the artifact is to solve a practical problem and where, in this case, the artifacts were evaluated against a set of requirements. The preference elicitation method, CAR-CE, was implemented in a web-questionnaire and was used in a real-world survey in cooperation with Upplands Väsby municipality. The elicited preferences were used in illustrative scenarios to demonstrate both the DANCE framework and XPLOR. POLA was demonstrated in three examples based on results from workshops that were conducted together with the municipalities of Norrköping, Katrineholm and Filipstad. Altogether, these artifacts support decision makers in modeling and analyzing decision problems, with the purpose of avoiding future costly and time-consuming conflicts in land use planning.