دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی بررسی نسل های جایگزین در فرآیندهای تصمیم گیری سیاست عمومی - الزویر 2019

Abstract

The design of alternatives is an essential part of decision making that has been less studied in theory and practice compared to alternatives’ evaluation. This topic is particularly relevant in the context of public policy making, where policy design represents a crucial step of the policy cycle since it determines the quality of the alternative policies being considered. This paper attempts to formalise the decision aiding process in two real interventions dealing with alternatives’ generation for territorial policy making in Italy. The aim of this research is to understand what generates novelty within the alternatives’ design phase of a decision aiding process, i.e. what allows to expand the solution space and discover new alternatives to solve the problem under consideration. It demonstrates ways in which creativity in decision processes can be supported by Operational Research/Multicriteria Decision Aiding tools. The two case studies are used to answer the following questions: i) Why have new alternatives arose during the policy making process? ii) How have they been generated? iii) Which consequences did they lead to? and iv) What generated novelty in the process? The results highlight two main reasons that can expand the solution space within a decision aiding process: i) dissatisfaction (of the client, of the analyst or of the relevant stakeholders, especially when dealing with public policies) with respect to the solutions currently proposed to the decision-making problem and ii) opportunity for a change in one of the variables/constraints.

Discussion and conclusions

This paper analysed two case studies dealing with territorial policy making aiming to understand and explain what generates novelty within a decision aiding process. In this section, we summarise our answers to the research questions that we formulated in the introduction, i.e. i) Why have new alternatives arose during the policy making process in the two case studies? ii) How have they been generated? iii) Which consequences did they lead to? and iv) What has generated novelty within the alternatives’ design phase of the decision aiding process?. The first case study deals with two different problem formulations, allowing to investigate the policy resistance mechanisms hampering the implementation of the GW protection policy in the Apulia Region. Concerning our research questions, we could report that: i) A new alternative has been conceived after the unsustainability of the water management system and the general dissatisfaction derived from the first formulation, where one of the stakeholders’ decision space was neglected (i.e. the Farmers’ ones). A limited understanding of the different problem framings was a source of conflict, reducing the effectiveness of the Regional GW protection policy. ii) The differences between the formulations underline that there are discrepancies in the way in which the situation is interpreted by the different stakeholders, leading to the identification of a new variable of the decision space. The new alternative (i.e. available GW resource according to Farmers’ perception) has been identified and integrated into the decision model.