Group Decision Making and Participatory Planning

Environmental problems are typically messy and complex. There may be high risks involved and/or lack of scientific agreement on the cause of problems. The problems may be ill defined, and the goals may not be clear. In addition, numerous decision makers or other stakeholders are often involved in environmental planning.

The stakeholders are defined to be “any group or individual who can affect, or is affected by, the achievement of a corporation’s purpose” (Freeman 1984). They could be persons like forest owners, farmers, forest workers or local inhabitants, or stakeholder groups such as tourism and recreation services, organizations concerned with nature conservation, rural communities, hunters associations, sporting and recreation associations or wood and forest industry (International Labour Office (ILO) 2000). Each of them can have different objectives concerning the use of forests or other natural resources, which further complicates the evaluation.

Group decision making is inevitable, for example, when dealing with forest planning of forest holdings owned by several people. In addition, group decision making is commonly used in business decision making, for instance wood procurement organizations. In group decision making, the total utility to be maximised can be taken as a combination of utilities of the persons belonging to the group. In group decision making typically at least some agreement among participants can be found, due to the organizational culture (Hjortsø 2004).