Public Participation in Selection of The Road Construction by AHP for Supporting of CO₂ Emissions Reduction: Maros-Watampone Road Case

Maros-Watampone road passes through a critical geometric conservation area where it is a barrier to the development improvement. Previous studies recommend that three proposed alternative constructions can be used: 1. Elevated Bridge, 2. Cut and Fill, 3. Tunnel system. The Government invited community members to participate in selection the best type of construction that can be applied at their region. That is one way to make the decision in the good governance process for the democratic country system. By using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), the results showed that the criteria of benefits (0.300) as a major factor in determining the priority of construction and the second is environmental criteria (0.224). In fact, construction cost (0.081) and maintenance criteria (0.054) had no significant effect. An elevated bridge construction is the most suitable construction to be applied (0.528), followed by cut and fill construction (0.248) and the tunnel system (0.223) respectively. The higher contribution of benefit and environmental criteria are indicated that the community preferences cannot be measured with price system. Besides fairly large energy consumption, the construction activity created CO2 emissions simultaneously. Thus a simply estimation of the CO2 emissions indicates that the elevated bridge construction has the lowest (1.31 TonCO2/km) emissions than the tunnel construction (1.79 TonCO2/km). The decision-making process showed that the public started to pay attention for their quality of life, and the environmental effect caused by their development activity. On the other hand, the Government has a limited budget to choose the best development program; therefore, we made an evaluation of the efficiency of economic resources based on: 1. Benefit-Cost analysis, 2. Net Present Value (NPV) analysis, 3. Internal Rate of Return (IRR) analysis. By the investment feasibility evaluation of the best construction can be proven that the public decision is the right choice to support the government decision. Public participation in economic development is the one way to reach efficiency of economic resources. Keywords: Public Participation, Decision-making, Analytic Hierarchy Process, CO2 Emissions, Efficiency of Economic Evaluation JEL codes: R, R5, R58