Rationale of the KerDST™ Deliberation Support Tool

In all areas of public policy, including regional development, company planning or collective risk management contexts, there is a need to identify social choice issues, identify stakeholders, assess and choose amongst the various options or courses of action that present themselves.

In ecological economics analysis, comparison of different aspects of social choice is essential. If action A is considered, the questions may be asked: What is gained by Action A? What is lost or excluded by choosing A rather than B? Who gains and who loses? Economists speak of the ‘opportunity costs’ of an action, this being defined as the value of the most attractive alternative foregone. The KerDST offers a way that the ‘values’ and ‘trade-offs’ are represented and evaluated.

This can be done with the notion of a ‘deliberation matrix’; a profile of judgments where an overall ranking emerges. A ruling over the appropriate benefits, risks and costs must be made – in other words a problem of fairness, justice, equity. Comparison of options means comparing a set of attributes with a variety of concepts, units of measure and criteria. Consequences of choice are distributed in time and will have distinctive times profiles e.g climate change, radioactive waste decay, fish population dynamics, dilution of chemical pollutions by natural processes, coastal erosion. For all actions, there are various degrees of uncertainty due to natural system complexity and social indeterminacies such as other decisions not yet made or known.

Many different reasons can be put forward as justifications, or not, of different outcomes. Assessment can be characterised by dilemmas and, in the case of communication and decisions- the need to yield ground or make concessions of principle, not just trade-offs on quantitative terms.

Most often distinct stakeholders will have their own distinctive attachments to some principles relative to others. The problem of social choice requires a deliberation about the overall evaluation and tradeoffs of the action options that present themselves to society.

By bringing together the three axis mentioned (stakeholders, scenarios, performance issues)we obtain a three-dimensional array; the basis of the KerBabel™ Deliberation Matrix (or cube). It permits a presentation of the processes and outcomes of judgments offered by each category of stakeholders, each option or scenario under evaluation, with reference to a spectrum of governance or quality-performance issues. By focusing on each cell of the ‘cube’ each stakeholder class should offer a judgment (satisfactory, poor, inacceptable) for each scenario in relation to each of the key governance or decision issues.

The main role of this 3-D array (scenarios of possible futures/categories of stakeholders/governance issues) is not to signal the best decision but to act as a deliberation support tool providing participants with a common framework and an opportunity for collaborative learning. Ideas for structuring multi-stakeholder dialogue and deliberative approaches to Sustainability Assessment can be implemented with the aid of the interactive online ICT tool KerBabel™ Deliberation Matrix and its associated KerBabel Indicator Kiosk (KIK).

The Deliberation Matrix restricts the number of indicators in a ‘basket’ to five. A reflective appraisal of the most significant considerations from a variety of viewpoints is sought rather than a full descriptive inventory of all features or changes.

The generic social choice problem (sustaining what, why and for whom?) means evaluation of scenarios takes place from many points of view using common ground (via the choice of indicators) and is expressed in a structured way. Ultimately the users of these tools must perform within their political status as actors in a collective process of social choice rather than a purely analytical approach.