TheDPSIR frameworkshows a chain of causes-effects from Driving forces (activities) to Pressures, to changes in the State of the environment, to Impacts and Responses. DPSIR is based on the assumption that economic activities and society’s behavior affect environmental quality. The relationships between these phenomena can be complex. DPSIR highlights the connection between the causes of environmental problems, their impacts, and the society’s response to them, in an integrated way.
- The Driving forces are represented by natural and social processes which are the underlying causes and origins of pressures on the environment. E.g. agriculture/land use change, industry, waste management. The Pressures are outcomes of the driving forces, which influence the current environmental state. They are the variables that directly cause (or may cause) environmental problems. E.g. polluting emissions, noise.
- The State describes physical, chemical or biological phenomena in the given reference area. It reflects the condition of the environment. E.g. air, water, soil quality.
- Impacts on population, economy, ecosystems describe the ultimate effects of changes of state, in terms of damage caused. E.g. eutrophication, biodiversity loss.
- The Responses demonstrate the efforts of society (e.g. politicians, decision-makers) to solve the problems. E.g. policy measures.
From the point of view of the decisional context, the Impact describes the existing problem. The negative Impact arises as a change in the environment’s State reduces the value (either in quantitative or qualitative terms) of the natural resource. The Response refers to the decision act: the chosen option aimed at reducing the negative pressures on the state of the environment. Driving forces, Pressures and States are the possible levels of intervention: a decision maker can choose one of them (or a combination of them) as a concrete object for his response.
Multi-criteria analysis or multi-criteria decision aid(MCA) is a well-known branch of decision theory, sometimes considered as a part of Operational Research, dealing with a number of considered evaluation criteria. Multi-criteria analysis can be used to describe any structured approach to determine overall preferences among alternative options, where the options accomplish several objectives.
A decision problem is considered to exist, when a planner or decision maker (DM) perceives a discrepancy between the current and desired states of the planning system, and when (i) the DM has alternative courses of action available; (ii) the choice of action can have a significant effect on this perceived difference; and (iii) DM is motivated to make a decision, but he or she is uncertain a-priori as to which option should be selected.
An indicator can be defined as a parameter or value derived from parameters, which provides information about a phenomenon. In particular, an environmental indicator is a parameter, which provides information about the situation or trends in the state of the environment, in human activities that affect or are affected by the environment, or about relationships among such variables.
In Multiple Criteria Analysis, it is an instrument that allows for the synthesis of certain information to lay the foundation for judging an action. This synthesis can be relevant in qualitative or quantitative terms, and relative to particular characteristics, attributes or effects (consequences) that might arise from the action’s implementation. Several indicators may be synthesized to define a criterion encompassing a broader point of view.
An index is a set of aggregated or weighted parameters or indicators.
Options/possible solutions/ course of actions represent decision acts whose outcomes can be simulated. Possible solutions comprise all feasible actions or activities that solve or contribute to the solution of the decision problem. Relating to the DPSIR framework, they represent the possible responses proposed to address the impacts.
Criterion is a measure against which options are assessed to evaluate the degree to which they achieve objectives. A tool for evaluating and comparing the potential actions according to a well-defined point of view.
Value function is a mathematical representation of human judgments. It translates the performances of the options into value scores, which represent the degree to which a decision objective is matched.
Decision rule is the procedure by which the relative outcomes of available options are aggregated. Through a decision rule, the multi-dimensional description of an option’s outcomes which refer to a set of decision criteria is transformed into the single value of an overall option’s performance.
Evaluation is a process of examining options and assessing their relative performance with regard to the selected criteria. In MCA the evaluation process encompasses both the assessment of the options’ outcomes (by means of value function) as well their aggregation by decision rules.
Alternative scenarios are hypothetical future events. They establish the social, environmental and socio-economic settings that can create changes in driving forces, when human activities are involved, and in state, when dealing with the environment. It is an exploration of a possible future for which an underlying set of assumptions has been made.
End user is the person that will use the mDSS to examine alternative strategies in water management in the catchment. End users are essentially institutional decision-makers who could use the results of the project in their activity as water managers. To facilitate communication and to avoid misunderstandings, they can be called “DSS users”.
Stakeholder is a social actor (individual or collective), who is an actual or a potential user of water resources for different purposes such as agriculture, industry, domestic consumption, recreational, or communication. Stakeholders are affected by the decisions of DSS users.
Integrated assessment (IA) is an interdisciplinary process of combining, interpreting, and communicating knowledge from diverse scientific disciplines in such a way that the whole set of cause-effect interactions of a problem can be viewed from a synoptic perspective (Rotmans and Dowlatabadi, 1998). Integrated assessment implies that science is exemplary and that it is being done in the context of social and economic forces at work in society. It is a new kind of science coupled to new economics, new sociology and new management policies (Harris, 2002).
Integrated assessment and modelling (IAM): is an interdisciplinary and participatory process combining, and interpreting communication knowledge from diverse scientific disciplines to allow a better understanding of complex phenomena (Rotmans and Van Asselt, 1996) The main purpose of IAM should be to inform policy and to support decision making. In some cases, when IAM is difficult or impossible to achieve, the process of IAM rather than the outcome allows important lessons to be learnt. IAM can be a methodology used for gaining insight over environmental problems, a framework to organise disciplinary research, a tool to integrate insights from the natural and social sciences.
IAM seeks to achieve multiple forms of integration in its approach to environmental issues (integration = linking models with GIS, integrating software, integrating stakeholder participation, integrating different scales, disciplines and models).
Today IAM combines the natural and social sciences to provide a broader view of the system and the impediments to better management and sustainability. It also seeks to enhance communication both between researchers and stakeholders and among IAM participants. It is a problem-focused area of research with studies often undertaken on a demand-pull, or stakeholder needs basis.
Tomorrow (optimistically) IAM tools may successfully integrate insights from the natural and social sciences. The results from the modeling and testing of alternate future scenarios are used to depict scenarios that extend beyond the recent range of experience to assist in the evaluation of more extreme events or frequencies and to develop appropriate environment and resource management policies. These results are effectively communicated to politicians, decision-makers, and community partners who then use the findings in their decisions about future actions. The overall pattern is one of integrated modeling, integrated application, integrated communication and integrated decision making (Parker et al., 2002).
Multi-sectoral: the components of a natural and/or social system; a particular resource or segment of the economy.
Integrated water resources management includes the planning and management of water resources and land. This takes account of social, economic and environmental factors and integrates surface water, groundwater and the ecosystems through which they flow.
Task Force Group
Within the NetSyMoD framework, the Task Force Group (TFG) will have the role of overseeing and steering the whole process. The TFG will include insiders – that is, actors directly involved in the process, familiar with it, or with specific expertise of relevance – and outsiders – people who are not familiar with the issue, but who can provide more objectivity, as well as fresh perspectives, mitigating the potential biases emerging from insiders’ pre-existing relationship with experts and stakeholders. The usefulness of involving outsiders in the TFG is limited in the case of experts’ consultation, and may thus be omitted without the risk of biasing the process. One or more facilitator(s) are then needed to support the TFG, and analyze the outcomes of the brainstorming exercise. The facilitator’s role is crucial for providing a correct and effective management of participation, even in these early stages. For the sake of efficiency, it is suggested that the TFG should include between 4 and 8 members.
Brainstorming meeting:
Loosely defined, any group activity involving the pursuit of new ideas can be defined as a brainstorming meeting. Thus, the purpose of a brainstorming meeting is to produce new ideas about a specific topic. A facilitator should be appointed to control the flow of information, and a member of the team to record ideas and report them back to the meetings’ participants.
Link to: http://www.scottberkun.com/essays/essay34.htm
Snowball sampling technique:
The snowball technique is used for identifying hidden populations such as groups whose organizational capacity is limited and who may not be easily recognizable. The sampling process begins with the TFG identifying the “seeds”, a relatively small number of people who are the first to be involved in the process. These seeds are then asked to name other actors belonging, in their view, to the same group of interested parties.
Social Network Analysis:
Social Network Analysis (SNA) is a framework strategy for investigating social structures, which enables researchers to translate core concepts of social and behavioral theories into a formal language, based on relational terms. Wetherell et al., 1994 define SNA in the following way:
“Most broadly, social network analysis (1) conceptualizes social structures as a network with ties connecting members and channeling resources, (2) focuses on the characteristics of ties rather than on the characteristics of the individual members, and (3) views communities as ‘personal communities’, that is, as networks of individual relations that people foster, maintain, and use in the course of their daily lives.” (p. 645)
SNA provides procedures to determine how a social system behaves, and mathematical and statistical methods to test the validity of theoretical underlying hypotheses of human behavior and interactions.
In SNA, actors can be individuals, groups, corporations, etc., who are interdependent. Relational ties establish a linkage between pairs of actors: relations may, for instance, express the evaluation of actors with respect to one another, or they may quantify the transfer of resources between actors; there may be behavioral interactions between actors, or physical connections. Relations may be directed (e.g. actor A phones to actor B) or undirected/reciprocal (the existence of a specific relation between actor A and B implies the same relations between B and A). Ties may either be present or absent, or they may have different strengths/values associated with them, etc. Actors and relations together form networks: networks, therefore, are the results of a process of defining a group of actors on which ties are to be measured.
Questionnaire:
Questionnaires should be used when the respondents can answer the questions directly, or when the respondent is a representative of an entity. In addition, questionnaires can also be used to structure face-to-face or telephone interviews. Within the NetSyMoD framework, questionnaires administered either through face-to-face interviews or mail surveys are suggested.
Within the proposed framework, the questionnaire should include at least three sections:
- Stakeholders’ identification.
- Stakeholders’ relations.
- Stakeholders’ views of the problem.
Stakeholders’ identification: key attributes of the person interviewed should be recorded in this section, including affiliation and role.
Stakeholders’ relations.
The interviewees will be asked to (i) identify the actors whom they interact with; and (ii) to identify the type of relationships existing with each of the actors mentioned previously, as well as the frequency.
Stakeholders’ views of the problem.
Information on stakeholders’ understanding of the specific decision-making problem, as well as their preferences. Part 3 of the questionnaire is clearly highly specific to the problem being analyzed, and it should be structured with open-ended or semi-structured questions. However, it should include information regarding both the problems and the preferred management responses.
Interviews
Telephone or face-to-face interviews are often used to gather data on egocentric networks. With this technique, there is a need to identify the right line of questioning and minimize interviewer bias by providing a standard checklist that should be followed. Open-ended questions should be preferred, as they will provide more information (although at the cost of increased difficulty in codifying the data, and comparing across actors).
Key actors
Through a positional analysis, key actors will be identified. Actors are structurally equivalent if they have identical ties to and from all other actors, and on all types of relations – structurally equivalent actors are, therefore, substitutable and, if two or more actors are structurally equivalent, there is no loss in generality in aggregating them. For the purpose of NetSyMoD, positional analysis should be carried out both on the basis of relations and views of the problem. A “similarity threshold” needs to be established, which will determine the degree of similarity required for actors to be considered substitutable.
Power structure
The distribution of power determines the synergies and interactions emerging in the network. The researcher – or the policy maker – will assess the strength and direction of identified relations, and single out those actors who are in a “central” position in the network – that is, those who play a crucial role, and to whose opinion/position the researcher/decision maker needs to pay particular attention to.
Central:
Traditionally, centrality measures of actors have been considered as good proxies for power position, based Freeman’s measures (Freeman, 1979):
- Degree centrality is the number of direct ties that involve a given node; it represents the level of communication activity – or the ability to communicate directly with others
- Closeness centrality depends on the minimal length of an indirect path between non-adjacent nodes, and represents independence – or the ability to reach a large number of alters while being able to rely on a minimum number of intermediaries
- Betweenness centrality reflects the intermediary location of a node along indirect relationships linking other nodes. A node with high betweenness has the capacity to facilitate or limit interactions between the nodes that it links. This measure represents control over communication – or the ability to restrict communication of others.
Role
The concept of role explores the behavior expected of a person occupying a particular social position.
Position
The position occupied by individual actors within the network is intended as the space in the network defined by the way in which occupants of a certain position relate to actors in other positions. Thus, the concept of social position refers to a collection of actors embedded in similar ways in the network.