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MCDA is increasingly used to support participatory and collaborative processes. In this paper, we describe and evaluate four real-life environmental planning projects where MCDA was used in different ways to evaluate the alternatives and to support stakeholder involvement. Based on our experience, we present five approaches for eliciting preferences or criteria weights of stakeholders, which vary from an expert-driven to a personal interview approach. We compare the pros and cons of these approaches, and give recommendations regarding their use. We believe that better awareness of different approaches and their applicability would enable MCDA experts to design more effective, meaningful and practical participatory processes. Our cases are from environmental planning, but the framework and conclusions are generic and thus applicable to other fields as well.

Knowledge integration in transdisciplinary projects can help to achieve a more comprehensive, balanced and relevant understanding of real-world problems and their potential solutions. In this paper, a project on reindeer management in northern Finland, RENMAN, is used to identify and examine some challenges that transdisciplinary projects face regarding knowledge integration and the roles taken by scientists to overcome the challenges as well as to explain why integration has or has not been successful. We identify and examine four challenges to knowledge integration: (1) the need for integration during the design of study questions and settings, (2) the need to manage competitive deliberative settings, (3) the potential mismatch between providing “optimal” policy recommendations and outputs integrating facts and values, and (4) the need to harness the benefits of the process to contribute to managing the problem in the future. Scientist in the RENMAN project used four roles to cope with these challenges: reflective scientist, intermediary, facilitator or capacity builder. Our key argument is that the metaphor of sensitivity can often explain the successes and failures regarding integration pursued by using the above mentioned roles. Sensitivity in transdisciplinary research encompasses attention toward the needs and problem definitions of knowledge holders and knowledge users, respect toward various worldviews, divergent perspectives and forms of knowledge, and the understanding of biases, power relations and possible marginalizations embedded in and resulting from knowledge production. Finally, flexibility to act on the knowledge gained through sensitivity is needed to design evolving processes able to contribute to the resolution of complex real-world problems.

Analytic–deliberative techniques have been suggested as a promising approach to ecosystem service (ES) valuation but are still at an experimental stage. This paper contributes to the development of ES valuation in the environmental impact assessment (EIA) procedure by introducing an analytic–deliberative approach to assessing restoration options for a regulated river in Finland. Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) with a value-focused approach was applied and compared with a desktop application of the ES-focused MCDA approach. We found out that the concept of ES could bring added value to the assessment process by: 1) enabling the framing and valuing especially of provisioning services — final ecosystem services, such as salmon catch in a more understandable way for the stakeholders, and 2) taking into account ecosystem processes and supporting services more precisely. However, some potential dangers of using the ES-based approach could include ES's appearing as a distant mode of thinking to affected groups and other stakeholders, and neglect of the trade-offs between ES and other relevant value and impact categories. Thus, although the ES framework is promising, it should not form a rigid ‘checklist’ way of making assessments but should rather be used to widen perspectives about potential issues in linking ecosystem properties to human benefits and values. It is argued that by combining the ES framework with the interactive MCDA approach, we can form a comprehensive and integrated approach to incorporating ESs into EIA.

Recreational fishing is one of the most popular leisure activities in western countries. From a conceptual viewpoint, recreational fishing includes fishing tourism. Over the last few decades, due to economic restructuring, nature-based tourism and related activities such as fishing are seen as a tool for revitalising the economic base of rural areas. In spite of the importance of fishing tourism as an economic activity, fishing tourism suffers from a lack of basic information on the sub-regional and local economic impacts of the phenomenon and this impedes, among other things, the development of the industry. The purpose of this study is to develop a process model to assess the regional economic impacts of fishing tourism. The idea of the model is to utilise as much as of the existing statistics provided by the authorities as possible. The benefits of using the existing data are, above all, to reduce the burden of empirical data collection. Thus, the aim of the study is to create a practical model that can be applied by researchers, planners and developers. Despite ignoring multiplicative effects, the model is useful for calculating basic regional economic indicators of fishing tourism in a simple, quick and cost-effective way, using a rigorous and comparable method. The model is applied in the case of the catchment area of the Iijoki, a river in northern Finland.

In this paper we discuss how the legitimacy of the impact assessment process is a key issue in conflict mediation in environmental impact assessment. We contrast two EIA cases in hydro-power generation plans made for the Ii River, Finland in different decades, and evaluate how impact assessment in these cases has contributed to the creation, mediation and resolution of conflicts. We focus on the elements of distributional and procedural justice that made the former EIA process more legitimate and consensual and the latter more conflictual. The results indicate that it is crucial for conflict mediation to include all the values and interests of the parties in the goal-setting process and in the definition and assessment of alternatives. The analysis also indicates that procedural justice is the most important to help the people and groups involved to accept the legitimacy of the impact assessment process: how different parties and their values and interests are recognized, and how participation and distribution of power are organized in an impact assessment process. It is confirmed in this article that SIA may act as a mediator or a forum providing a process through which competing knowledge claims, various values and interests can be discussed and linked to the proposed alternatives and interventions.