Multicriteria and Social Choice Methods in Assessing Water Management Plans

Selection of a good water management plan for the river basin is a complex decision-making problem because interests of stakeholders are usually confronted, rarely in complete agreement. If water committee has to emulate interest and power of key parties, decision-making process can be organized in many different ways, depending on adopted methodology for deriving decisions and formalizing setup to implement solutions. Group context brings individuals with different background, attitude and (in)consistencies they will demonstrate while evaluating and/or judging options. In this paper, we show how two methodologically distinct tools can efficiently support group decision making at a group and sub-group level within committee. We propose to firstly use analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to rank management plans, and secondly, to use voting method Borda Count (BC) for final ranking of plans selected by post analysis of the AHP results. Illustrative example from Brazil is used to show usefulness of combined approach.