Drawing Up a National Plan for Public Sanitation: A Participatory Group Decision Approach

This paper presents a new model for drawing up a National Plan for Public Sanitation in Brazil in a way that includes the greater participation by society. Society has a right guaranteed by law to participate in the formulation of policies and planning related to public sanitation. Thus, this article makes an analysis of the current process and detects opportunities to improve on how society participates. To do so, a group decision model is proposed based on Soft System Methodology (SSM) and the Approval Voting method (AV) in order to enhance learning about the problem and structuring it and to obtain a consensus on the policies and actions that will guide the management of sanitation services over a period of 20 years. A simulation of the application of the proposed model is presented.