Description: Although the value of and need for incorporating stakeholder views into analysis of environmental issues is now widely recognised, it is still necessary to ensure that best-practise is followed in terms of both the overriding principles that are followed when engaging with stakeholders and the methodologies used for this engagement. The former may best be achieved by adopting key elements of best-practice from normative decision theory, descriptive approaches and prescriptive decision aiding. We will also strive to meet this objective by engaging with stakeholders at all stages of the project, i.e. via pre-model, on-model and post-model engagement. In terms of the latter, we will validate the robustness of the methods employed for stakeholder engagement during the course of the project and thus overcome a key issue identified in terms of analytic-deliberative analyses a lack of reflexivity. PRIMA will determine the most appropriate ethnographic approach(es) to elucidate stakeholder perspectives with regards to scenario design and formulating agent decision rules and the procedures that should underpin such approaches e.g. grounded theory. For the formalisation process we propose to use a generic agent architecture for all stakeholders as identified in the cases. The empirical case studies will disclose the most relevant drivers and decisional processes determining stakeholders behaviour, which will be used in formalising the stakeholders, thus including only the relevant elements from the generic agent architecture.
Research objectives: PRIMA will develop a method for scaling down the analysis of policy impacts on multifunctional land-use and on the economic activities. Special attention will be paid to the structural effects of the policies and on their impact on the environment quality in the regions.
Results and products: PRIMA expected outcomes are the following:
- Increased awareness among stakeholders on the potential gains of model based approaches, and on the need to interpret model results in light of assumptions used in the analyses. In turn, this fosters better communication between model developers and end users, - Agent-based models of municipality case studies for scenario-analysis/identification and policy/management experiments, implementing structural changes as well as potential impacts of policies, - Sets of virtual municipality prototypes representing contrasted situations and potential evolutions, selected for their robustness and relevance for the stake-holders, - Maps of structural evolutions at municipality level in a set of regional case studies, related to a choice of policy scenarios and a set of impact assessment indicators, - Evaluation of robust differences between the evolutions provided by the aggregation of municipality level micro-simulations and agent models and available models at regional scale, - A better understanding of the regional rural response to global and national trends. How can regional policy be effectively used for realising future opportunities and decreasing future threats?, - New principles for the enhancement of the screening and the scope of strategic environmental assessment (SEA), sustainability impact assessment (SIA) and environmental impact assessments (EIA).
A database structured, formatted and documented in accordance with the standardization efforts in the field of geospatial analysis of human-environment relationships: the Global Earth Observation System of Systems and the INfrastructure for SPatial Information in Europe. |