Research Approaches, Tools and Algorithms for Participatory Processes Love Ekenberg, Karin Hansson, Mats Danielson, Göran Cars et al. Deliberation Representation Equity Research Approaches, Tools and Algorithms for Participatory Processes Love Ekenberg, Karin Hansson, Mats Danielson, Göran Cars et al. Deliberation Representation Equity To access digital resources including: blog posts videos online appendices and to purchase copies of this book in: hardback paperback ebook editions Go to: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/546 Open Book Publishers is a non-profit independent initiative. We rely on sales and donations to continue publishing high-quality academic works. ONLINE SURVEY In collaboration with Unglue.it we have set up a survey (only ten questions!) to learn more about how open access ebooks are discovered and used. We really value your participation, please take part! 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Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. PHOTOS Åsa Andersson Broms, Love Ekenberg, Anna Hesselgren, Björn Larsson and Rebecca Medici. Photographs not attributed to specified persons have been taken by Love Ekenberg. COVER IMAGE Love Ekenberg DESIGN Karin Hansson ILLUSTRATIONS Gov2u ISBN Paperback: 9781783743032 ISBN Hardback: 9781783743049 ISBN Digital (PDF): 9781783743056 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 9781783743063 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 9781783742974 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0108 All paper used by Open Book Publishers is SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative), PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes) and Forest Stewardship Council(r)(FSC(r) certified. Printed in the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia by Lightning Source for Open Book Publishers (Cambridge, UK) Table of Contents Contributors 1 Prologue 3 Introduction 9 CONCEPTUALISATION 17 1 Interdisciplinarity and Mixed Methods 21 2 The Concept of Democracy 33 3 Art as a Creative and Critical Public Space 47 4 Plural Democracy 73 ELICITATION 89 5 Criteria Weight Elicitation – A Comparative Study 95 6 Cardinal and Rank Ordering of Criteria with Clouds 113 7 Attitude Ranking 133 8 Evaluating ICT and Development 145 9 A Mobile Urban Drama as a Model for Interactive Elicitation 161 CALCULATION 179 10 Multi-Criteria Decision Making 185 11 Comparing MCDA Methods 201 12 Algorithms for Decision Analysis 219 APPLICATIONS 239 13 A Model for Flood Risk Management: Bac Hung Hai 245 14 A Model for Flood Risk Management: Tisza 257 15 Roşia Montană Gold Exploitation 267 16 Decision Making in Urban Planning 297 17 Actory: Visualising Reputational Power to Promote Deliberation 313 18 Njaru: Developing Tools for Deliberation in Multiple Public Spheres 335 19 Evaluation of an Online Learning Environment 347 20 A Low Carbon Society by 2050 – The Stockholm-Mälar Region Case 357 Epilogue 369 Publications 373 1 Contributors Love Ekenberg is a senior research scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg and full professor of Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University. Karin Hansson is an artist and a postdoc in Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University. Mats Danielson is vice president and full professor of Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University, and an affiliate researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). Göran Cars is full professor of Societal Planning and Environment at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Lars In de Betou is a media producer and a musician at Betou media AB and at Stockholm University. Joost Buurman is assistant director and senior research fellow, Institute of Water Policy, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. Manilla Ernst is a lecturer at the Centre for the Studies of Children’s Culture at Stockholm University. Tobias Fasth is a researcher at the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University. Rebecca Forsberg is the artistic leader and director of the RATS Theatre in Stockholm. Johanna Gustafsson Fürst is an artist and senior lecturer at University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm. Karin E. Hansson is assistant professor in Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University. Petter Karlström is a senior lecturer and program coordinator in interaction design at the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University. Florence N. Kivunike is a lecturer in the Department of Information Technology, School of Computing and Information Technology, College of Computing and Information Sciences at Makerere University. 2 Deliberation, Representation, Equity Aron Larsson is associate professor in Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University and Mid-Sweden University. Thomas Liljenberg is an artist in Stockholm. Hans Liljenström is full professor at the Division of Biometry and Systems Analysis, Department of Energy and Technology, at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) and the director of Agora for Biosystems at the Sigtuna Foundation. Adina Marincea is a researcher at the Median Research Centre (MRC) in Bucharest. Adriana Mihai is a researcher at the Center of Excellence for the Study of Cultural Identity (CESIC) at the University of Bucharest as well as an affiliated researcher at Median Research Center. Mona Riabacke is a consultant in risk and decision analysis at Riabacke & Co in Stockholm. Willmar Sauter is professor emeritus of theatre at Stockholm University. Uno Svedin is visiting professor at the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University and senior researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC). Michael Thompson is senior research scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), fellow at the James Marin Institute for Science and Civilization, University of Oxford, and senior researcher at the Stein Rokkan Centre for Social Research, University of Bergen. F.F. Tusubira is managing partner at Knowledge Consulting Ltd in Kampala. He is also the founding former CEO of the UbuntuNet Alliance. Harko Verhagen is senior lecturer and researcher at the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University. Måns Wrange is an artist, former vice-chancellor of the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, and visiting professor of Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University. 3 Participation has become an important part of research and design processes, not least in fields such as art, urban planning and design. At the same time, there is an ever-growing demand for fair participatory processes, supported by IT-based methods such as voting systems, communication platforms, and various crowd-sourcing techniques. However, the success of these has been very variable. Loosely speaking, communications have been tremendously successful in some domains, whereas tools for more analytical support have failed to a significant extent. The question arises whether this is to do with the specific tools, or whether there are some hidden mechanisms that are more dominant, for instance relating to the conceptualisations involved. We might have ideas of democracy, fairness, and equity that are inadequately represented in the tools available, making them useless for anyone concerned with such notions. Concepts like these are of course social constructs, and there are no final and unifying ideas regarding what participation and deliberation actually mean in relation to them – totally independent of whether the methods involved are IT-supported or not. Nevertheless, the tools must at least mimic the preconceptions, whatever they are. Often there are underlying liberal notions of democracy and equity involved somewhere, where an individual’s right to participate is emphasised and assumed, but the idea that the same individual should be provided with at least some reasonable means of doing it on an equal basis is not necessarily present. In these contexts, there is often a strong tendency to try to reach, or even impose, consensus, ignoring the fact that unequal power relations in a group of participants can actually be both meaningful and motivating, and can enlighten the various conditions, unspoken norms of community and the different Prologue 4 Deliberation, Representation, Equity interests and diversity found in all societies. It therefore seems a good idea to attempt to specify what we actually mean by the various concepts we have here, and, assuming that we accept these concepts, investigate how we can instrumentalise them when forming fruitful concepts of fairness, equity, participation and democracy in this digital era. The problems involved are not easy and there are (fortunately) no definite answers, but trying to clarify this seems to be worth the effort. Moreover, if we also can utilise the concepts and provide some accessible tools as structural and analytical support, we can probably better understand the decision structures involved. If we identify and analyse the various components and processes involved, much can be gained. In this book, we discuss various aspects of these problems: our aim is not only to analyse them but to provide solutions and methods, while still keeping in mind the significant conceptual problems involved. To make this reasoning more concrete, one central question has been to combine a reasonable concept of deliberate democracy with a reasonable notion of equity and representation. And even if we are able to do this, there are several more practical issues to be resolved. If we take participatory democracy seriously and really want to obtain large-scale citizen involvement and transparency in public participatory decision making, then decision making processes become significantly more difficult. The various decision scenarios are usually far from clear, and likewise the process of the decision formation. Firstly, it is complicated conceptualising participation in relation to representativeness and engagement as well as a multitude of other factors, including the methodology. Secondly, even if we have a clear picture of the participating agents, it is still very difficult to understand what are the true preferences involved. To elicit these involves several complicated tasks. Thirdly, even if we have access to these preferences and attitudes, we want to be able to utilise them, for instance, for more analytical and transparent decision making. However, neither these preferences nor the factual information available can normally be assigned precise values, making the processing and calculation of this complex information also very difficult from an algorithmical viewpoint. To tackle these problems, we have for some years been working with various aspects of participatory decision making, and have created IT-supported process models for decision making in such settings. By combining a number of fields – such as mathematics, social science, and the arts – we have addressed both the problem of communication, internally within governmental bodies and 5 Prologue externally to citizens, and that of modelling and analysis of decision structures and processes. We have, not surprisingly, found that collaborative information sharing and deliberative discussions are important parts of a democratic process which should take place on a multitude of platforms. We have also found that the vast number of specific tools and methods available are seldom used to any significant extent. Surprisingly little in the literature records actual use of decision processes with elaborated tool support, and very little research relates to successful uses of inclusive decision processes. Even if they incorporate peer communication and discussions as a way of reaching consensus, the discussions are seldom combined with any sophisticated means of enabling deliberative democracy, with all the complexities involved, even disregarding the obvious practical factors, such as time, access, and means to participate in the collaborative work. Despite this rather lugubrious perspective, we nevertheless believe that the potential of more systematised tools would be substantial if these problems were better understood and handled, and here is also where the tool support becomes instrumental. In the work behind this book, we have not only been studying descriptive aspects, but have also aimed to solve problems by developing and using new tools, methods, and working cultures, even in more innovative forms such as artistic performances, as a basis for constructive dialogues and expressions of preferences and analysis. We have tried to find new problem formulations and solutions, with the intention of carrying the decision from agenda- setting and problem awareness to feasible courses of action via formulations of objectives, alternative generation, consequence assessments, and trade-off clarifications. Our ambitions have been to provide applicable and computationally meaningful public decision mechanisms, involving various components such as multiple-criteria, multi-stakeholder points of view, uncertain scenarios, uncertain appraisals of the consequences involved, vague value assessments, and visual formats for presentation of risk information. The work in this book has been partly funded by the Swedish Research Council FORMAS as well as by strategic funds from the Swedish government (SFO) within ‘ICT – the Next Generation’. It has been developed partly within the eGovlab at the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences and partly within the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria. The result of all this is that we are now considerably better able to analyse the decision components of the different interests at stake as well as organise the necessary decision making procedures, 6 Deliberation, Representation, Equity where, for example, municipalities in constructive modes can handle dialogues and decision making, even in conflicting situations. Furthermore we know much more about the effects of a proposed plan, how conditions for constructive dialogues can be created, how options can be valued, how the decision situations can be organised against the background of perceived values and problems, and how to utilise the potentials of various models and tools when applied from government, public administration, urban planning, and citizen/stakeholder perspectives. We believe that this socio-technical construct is a major step in the use of well-informed decision analysis for evaluation of critical societal issues, and hopefully will have a significant impact of the applicability of decision theory in general and on modernising the field of decision, policy and societal risk analysis. Love Ekenberg, Karin Hansson, Mats Danielson and Göran Cars Vienna, New York, Stockholm 9 Tools and methods to support participatory decision making often focus on a specific part of the process, ignoring the wider context. In this project we have started out from a broader picture, situating particular parts of the process in relation to each other and trying to promote a mutual recognition of different levels of information production that play a role in the decision making processes. The research project has looked at participatory decision making processes in the following cases: RINKEBY-KISTA: URBAN DEVELOPMENT The suburbs of Husby and Kista are situated next to each other in Rinkeby-Kista in the north of Stockholm, and were built in the 1970s and 1980s. There are huge differences between the two areas. The population of Husby has over 12,000 residents, registers high unemployment rates and has a high proportion of first- and second-generation immigrants. Kista is known as the Silicon Valley of Sweden; it contains several of Sweden’s leading companies in new technologies and IT, and over 25,000 people work there. It is an expanding area with many new developments and there are tensions arising from gentrification. SVARTÅN RIVER: POLLUTION The river Svartån flows through Örebro, the sixth largest city in Sweden. The river is under intensive agricultural use, and is polluted from nitrate fertilisers, with quite severe social and economic consequences including a decline of cultural and economic value of the land. The aim of the case study was to reach a more sustainable long-term solution with improved water quality in spite of socio-economic constraints. Introduction © L. Ekenberg, K. Hansson, M. Danielson, G. Cars et al. , CC BY -NC-ND 4.0 http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0108.22 10 Deliberation, Representation, Equity THE RED RIVER DELTA: FLOODING The Red River Delta, and more specifically the Bac Hung Hai polder in northern Vietnam, exhibits characteristics of a region in stress: increasing numbers of floods, dense and increasing population, and a lowland terrain. The 225,000 ha of the polder is largely agricultural land, with an elevation ranging from sea level to 10 metres. The case study involved 11,200 persons (out of a total population in the polder of 2.8 million), all of whom are at risk of flooding. The aim of the study was to design, with strong stakeholder involvement, a disaster risk management insurance scheme for the region. TISZA: FLOOD RISK MANAGEMENT The Tisza river traverses Hungary from north to south. Repeated floods are severe, especially in the north eastern part of Hungary: financial losses, and costs of compensation to victims and mitigation strategies are increasing. The aim of the case study was the same as for the Red River Delta, above. ROȘIA MONTANĂ: GOLD EXPLOITATION Roșia Montană is a commune of Alba County in western Transylvania with rich mineral resources that have been exploited since Roman times. It is also the context for a longstanding conflict around plans to open a new mine. The aim of the study was to clarify the decision components involved and suggest a course of action. UPPLANDS VÄSBY: URBAN DEVELOPMENT Upplands Väsby is a municipality in the northern part of the Stockholm region with just over 40,000 inhabitants. It experienced rapid growth in the 1960s and 1970s, becoming a commuter suburb for the labour-force in workplaces in the central region. Rapid growth of the Stockholm region has opened up new possibilities for the future development of Upplands Väsby and the plan is to increase its population, and also the number of workplaces, and to strengthen public and commercial services. THE STOCKHOLM-MÄLAR REGION: A LOW-CARBON SOCIETY The Stockholm-Mälar region is home to almost three million inhabitants, with a rapidly expanding population. It is also a region with very high innovation orientation, involving global high-tech, telecom, medical/pharmaceutical specialities and other cutting- edge technologies. The design of policies for the region is highly relevant for future-planning in other areas. 11 Introduction Figure 1. The participatory analytic decision model. 12 Deliberation, Representation, Equity A comparison of our case studies shows how information is developed and structured on different levels. On what can be called a conceptualisation level, various ideas and meanings are expressed and developed in a plurality of forums, from the dominant public sphere in global media resources to the webpages of local organisations, residents’ closed social media groups and semi- private e-mail lists, as well as agencies’ direct communication with residents in meetings, focus groups and surveys. On an elicitation level, the municipal, organisations or individuals are using a variety of methods to extract data produced in some of these public sources. On a calculation level, the data is analysed and developed to create meaningful and more informed feedback to the discussions and decision making that takes place on the first conceptualisation level. The Participatory Analytic Decision Model (Figure 1) on the previous page consists of three interacting layers: the conceptualisation layer where public opinions are developed and surveyed, enabling feedback from inhabitants and stakeholders; the elicitation layer where data is gathered; and the calculation layer where data is modelled and analysed using multi-criteria decision analysis. The challenge here is to acknowledge the inequalities and power asymmetries on the conceptualisation level where problems are acknowledged and developed, but at the same time to use the data produced in these contexts in a meaningful way. Participants in a decision process are never a homogenous group. Within a neighbourhood, differences in interest due to intersecting factors such as age, sex, professional status, ethnicity or religion may occur. Some people spend their entire lives at the site, while others are in a stage of transfer, and the local commons is intertwined with many parallel social commons. Residents living in a neighbourhood might have very different interests to residents in adjacent areas of the municipality and the region. In order to conceptualise the problem, definitions and interests at stake, the public spheres that create discourse at the site need to be understood. Given the fact that residents have conflicting interests it can be analysed and discussed to what extent these differences can be overcome by reformulations of possible solutions, and how mechanisms for conflict resolution can be incorporated. To identify conflicts and common interests, the interplay between stakeholders has to be addressed. This effort includes a mapping of interests among stakeholders involved. Before making any decision, the problem has to be clarified, and the stakeholders have to be defined. The democratic problem is that the public sphere – where the issue is most often