Evaluation and Assessment of Sustainability Policies

Giuseppe Munda

Notas Económicas, 2023, issue 56, 8-32

Abstract: Sustainability policy evaluation and assessment seeks to answer the key question, sustain-ability ofwhat and whom? Consequently, sustainability issues are multidimensional in nature and feature a high degree of conflict, uncertainty and complexity. Social multi-criteria evaluation (SMCE) has been explicitly designed for public policies; it builds on formal mod-elling techniques whose main achievement is the fact that the use of different evaluation criteria translates directly into plurality of values and dimensions underpinning a policy process. SMCE aims at being inter/multi-disciplinary (with respect to the technical team), participatory (with respect to the community) and transparent. SMCE can help deal with three different types of sustainability-related policy issues: 1) epistemological uncertainty (human representation of a given policy problem necessarily reflects perceptions, values and interests of those structuring the problem); 2) complexity (the existence of different levels and scales at which a hierarchical system can be analyzed implies the unavoidable existence of non-equivalent descriptions of it both in space and time); and 3) mathemati-cal manipulation rules of relevant information (compensability versus non-compensability, preference modelling of intensities of preference, mixed information on criterion scores, weights as trade-offs versus weights as importance coefficients, choice of a proper ranking algorithm). This paper focuses on the these three issues and provides an overview of the SMCE approaches to them.

Keywords: Complexity theory; social multi-criteria evaluation; history of economic thought: social choice; SOCRATES software. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B16 B23 C44 D04 D71 D81 H4 Q01 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gmf:journl:y:2023:i:56:p:8:32

DOI: 10.14195/2183-203X_56_1

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