Social choice theory and its applications in sustainable forest management—a review

Abstract

Important decisions of mankind have for centuries been made using voting techniques, both in small groups and in nationwide elections. Currently, involvement of public in forestry decision making is seen as an important part of sustainable forest management, both as a means to an end and as an end in itself. In public participatory processes, issues such as fairness, representativity, and transparency are important, as well as in any election. Therefore, it is natural to utilise the achievements of voting theory also in decision support for sustainable forest management. In this article, first a review of basic voting techniques is given, along with some new techniques involving elements of fuzziness or randomness. Second, modifications of voting for multicriteria decision aid are presented and, finally, applications of voting to natural resources management are described. The applicability of voting approaches to the group decision support and participatory planning of forestry are discussed. The most significant advantages of voting methods for this kind of decision support processes were found to be their ability to deal with ordinal preferences of decision makers and ordinal evaluation data on alternatives. In addition, voting methods are comprehensive and easy to interpret. This makes the decision support process transparent and quick and convenient to implement even with large groups of people, and via information networks.