• Five energy scenarios decarbonising the Faroe Islands’ energy system are generated • Two MCDA methods are used to assess the scenarios • Partial agreement between the two MCDA methods • A combined social scoring is determined for different technologies • Inclusion of local social perspectives shifted preferences to offshore scenarios Planning for the decarbonisation of island energy systems is both crucial and fraught with complexities. The process to develop and evaluate these plans needs to encompass not only technical and economic specifics but each plan's impacts on the environment and local inhabitants must also be considered. This inclusive planning involves multiple criteria and requires a means of handling them. In this paper a series of potential future energy systems are generated with the EnergyPlan software for the Faroe Islands before these systems are assessed using a set of criteria covering their environmental, social, technical and economic aspects. These criteria are used by two multi-criteria approaches, along with actual weights obtained from local stakeholders, to rank the energy systems. It is found that there is a clear shift in rankings towards systems employing offshore technologies due to the inclusion of social criteria specifically fitted to the Islands’ resident's preferences. This shift, however, was not sufficient for these offshore scenarios to outperform other scenarios that performed well on the other criteria. These findings indicate there is likely value in terms of local acceptance for transition planning on the Islands in adjusting to include greater quantities of offshore technologies in future energy strategies.