Stakeholder Engagement and ANP Best Research Practices in Sustainable Territorial and Urban Strategic Planning

Abstract

Strategic planning of sustainable territorial urban development (STUD) is usually carried out on the basis of a participatory decision-making process that focuses on important, sometimes conflicting issues and their impact on stakeholders. For this reason, ANP is particularly well suited for this purpose since it makes it easier for stakeholders to participate in the decision-making process as a group with minimum knowledge of the MCDM process. This study explores the use of ANP in sustainable development and in particular in territorial urban planning (STUD) and, more importantly, examines whether the method is being properly used in terms of its participatory decision-making and stakeholder engagement potential. Also, this research investigates if current ANP studies are reported in a way that allows the assessment of their validity and provides suggestions to address the identified gaps. For this purpose, the extent of the proper use of ANP in STUD applications in terms of (1) stakeholder engagement and (2) best ANP research practices, will be systematically reviewed in this paper in order to obtain a list of recommendations to optimize the use of ANP in STUD studies.