Modelling Multicriteria Decision Making Process for Sharing Benefits from the Reservoir at Serbia-Romania Border

The Djerdap I is a hydro-electric power plant built as a concrete dam across the transboundary waters of the Danube between Serbia and Romania. Aside from its purposes as a hydro-electric plant, the reservoir provides an outlet for outdoor recreation, tourism, fishing, irrigation, and serves as a water supply all while providing river transport for both trade and passenger vessels. As it is transboundary, the system is used by the two involved countries on an equal-share agreement with consistent collaboration between Serbia and Romania being required to maintain operations. However, with increasing interest in the potential for the Djerdap I to act as a venue for international transport and trade between EU countries and countries surrounding the Black Sea it is important to reinforce and facilitate future group decision-making efforts between the two countries to ensure optimal and timely consensus in operating the system. In regards to that, we propose to create a decision-making framework around a well-known multi-criteria decision-making method—the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)—and to encourage the interest groups from both sides to adopt the framework. Included are the descriptions of how the participation of different interest groups can be modeled in the search for the optimal water distribution between key consumptive and non-consumptive water uses. An integrative approach is proposed to preserve the active participation of interest groups at both national and bilateral (Serbia-Romania) levels. In order to expand the national group decision-making context towards a bilateral (pan-group) context where representatives of two national ‘groups’ participate in deriving a common solution for the involved countries, a method for aggregating individual decisions is given. The obtained results show that the proposed approach can bridge the gap between researchers and policy makers if scientific competence and the insights of practitioners about the problem are combined within the unixque decision-making paradigm.