Bringing communities at the Centre of Impact Assessment of Road Projects: integrating AHP with qualitative research

Abstract

This paper proposes a framework for measuring impacts associated with road projects on rural communities situated on either side of the road alignment. The extant approaches for measuring community impacts of road projects follow a “top-down” approach and require assumptions while imputing monetary values to community impacts. We present an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) based alternative approach wherein the community is placed firmly at the center. We made no presumptions regarding the prioritization of benefits and costs by the communities. A road constructed between two towns in western India has been used as a test case. The AHP hierarchies for benefits and costs have been designed by fully involving the communities. We term the resulting benefit–cost ratio as Community Impact Index. Additionally, this research contains two innovations. The first innovation is about adaptation of the 9-point AHP instrument to a pictorial scale for better comprehension by respondents with low literacy and awareness. The second is about the comparison of hypothetical alternative road designs along with the actual ones to gain insights into design improvement possibilities.