Dealing with fairness in public policy analysis : a methodological framework

Fairness in the policy process can be seen as an ethical obligation to take a plurality of social values, perspectives and interests into account. This means that fairness is very much linked to the concept of democracy. How can we then implement some reasonable democratic principles in the policy analysis process? Two main tools exist: cost-benefit analysis and multi-criteria evaluation. The use of cost-benefit analysis implies strong distributional consequences, while multi-criteria evaluation seems to be a better tool to tackle conflicting points of view in the ex-ante policy evaluation process. The implementation of fairness inside a public policy framework mainly implies that a) social values, interests and desires should be considered as much as possible, b) distributional issues have to be illuminated at the maximum possible degree and c) the whole evaluation process should be transparent. Social multi-criteria evaluation can comprise all these three characteristics.