Stakeholders’ Opinions: Food Sustainability as an Exemplary Case

Lars Carlsen () and Rainer Bruggemann ()
Additional contact information
Lars Carlsen: Awareness Center
Rainer Bruggemann: Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, 2021, vol. 157, issue 1, No 4, 43-56

Abstract: Abstract Stakeholders decisions often are based on the construction of an indicative quantity (a composite indicator), which can be obtained by an aggregation process of a series of single indicators. This aggregation process combines single indicators to one quantity, the composite indicator. In the most simple aggregation technique a weighted sum is applied. Unfortunately, stakeholders often have different opinions concerning the individual weights that should be associated with single indicators. The resulting composite indicator applied for an eventual ranking may consequently be different from stakeholder to stakeholder. The present study focuses on a partial order based methodology for evaluating stakeholders’ opinions based on the food sustainability index for 2017 as an exemplary case. The paper presents the methodological background for the use of composite indicators under different weighting schemes. The food sustainability index (FSI) is composed through an aggregation of three main indicators, i.e., food loss and waste, sustainable agriculture and nutritional challenges. In the present case four fictitious ‘stakeholders’, represented by four different weighting schemes, expert-based, political, outcome-based and uniform are included. The study shows that differences between the four weighting schemes are present. Furthermore it is shown that within certain limits the overall ranking of 34 countries based on the FSI leads to a linear ranking of 4 specific groups of countries, virtually summarizing the different stakeholders’ opinions.

Keywords: Food sustainability; Stakeholders; Weighting schemes; Partial ordering; Composite indicators (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11205-019-02209-6 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:soinre:v:157:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1007_s11205-019-02209-6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11135

DOI: 10.1007/s11205-019-02209-6

Access Statistics for this article

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement is currently edited by Filomena Maggino

More articles in Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().