Enabling Public Participation in Strategic Environmental Assessment: An Application of Multicriteria Analysis

This article is part of a Special Issue on ICT-based Strategies for Environmental Conflicts. Since the last decades Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) has been recognized as a very important and rapidly growing area of research and application in the domain of sustainable development. It has been generally agreed that public participation must be integrated in SEA procedure because it allows information relevant to the decisionmaking process to be included. In this sense, one of the major challenge in this area is to detect some tools which are able to better link the decision-making process and the stakeholders involved in the decision. The paper proposes an application of a method belonging to the Multiple Criteria Decision Aiding family in order to support the preparation of a land-use plan for a small town in Northern Italy, highlighting the relationship among the performed evaluation the SEA procedure and the participatory planning process that has been carried out in order to involve the population in planning decisions.