Deliberative methods to assess ecosystem service values arose as a response to the various objections (e.g., collective nature; multidimensional properties) of using economics to assign a monetary value to nature. Those methods are based on shared/social preferences and provide the appropriate framework for capturing the various value dimensions going beyond self-interested preferences. The primary objective of this paper is to present the methodological design and the application of a deliberative multicriteria evaluation (DMCE) method to assess the values of four ecosystem services (swimming days, flood mitigation, river health and drinking water quality) and explore the reasoning behind people's choices when decisions are taken in a deliberative context. To do so, we video recorded and analyzed the group deliberations. To apply the method at an operational level, we followed six main steps: 1. Choosing the jury; 2. Selecting the environmental attributes (ecosystem services) and developing indicators understandable by the general public using a spatially distributed modeling framework; 3. Developing alternative management options for the study area; 4. Designing the assessment task using reverse swing weighting and; 5. Running the DMCE workshops and; 6. Analyzing the results both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Results/Conclusions
We implemented four DMCE experiments with eight panels of residents of the Cocheco and Lamprey subwatersheds in New Hampshire. All groups reached internal consensus on the relative value of the four ecosystem services, while the pattern of trade-off weights across groups was reasonably similar. We outline themes of discussion that affected participants' preferences change during the deliberation and discuss how this information may support environmental strategies and policies.