Towards decision and negotiation support in multi-stakeholder development of lake regulation policy

We describe an approach for multicriteria modeling and support of multi-stakeholder decision processes. We report on its testing in the development of a new water level management policy for a regulated lake-river system in Finland. In the framework the stakeholders are involved in the decision process from the problem structuring stage to the group consensus seeking stage. This aims at creating an evolutionary learning process. We focus on the use of a new interactive method for finding and identifying Pareto-optimal alternatives. Role playing experiments are used to test the practical applicability of this method of improving directions, a negotiation support procedure by (Ehtamo et al., 1998). We also describe the preference programming approach for the aggregation of the stakeholder opinions in the final evaluation of alternatives and consensus seeking.