Socio-Economic Research Programme

Project Summary

Decision-making concerning land use and the environment is increasingly complex. Interest groups frequently disagree about the economic, social and ecological effects of environmental changes and policy interventions. There is a need to ensure that the full range of values and positions concerning a decision, and the likely responses to policy changes, are taken into account.

The project takes the Water Framework Directive as an initial case study. The Directive requires the development of decision frameworks, including social, economic and scientific aspects, to assist in the management of water basins. The research will use the agent-based simulation model FEARLUS (Framework for Evaluation and Assessment of Regional Land Use Scenarios), developed in the Institute, to help identify the circumstances in which various intervention strategies (such as fines or incentives) are effective in preventing over-exploitation. Concurrent development of distributed multi-pollutant transport and impacts models is essential to provide the necessary process-level model input.

The project will also investigate methods for the analysis of different positions held by different actors. Value mapping based upon a multi-criteria approach can explore value conflicts affecting resource management. The aim here is to develop a framework for interest group and public participation (e.g. via focus groups, citizens' juries, and stakeholder analysis) to explain differing priorities, and to show how combining these approaches can provide insight for the application of policy.

Integration of work on distributed pollutant models, agent-based simulation, and multi-criteria value mapping is central to the project's aims.