Multi expert and multi criteria evaluation of sectoral investments for sustainable development: An integrated fuzzy AHP, VIKOR / DEA methodology
Introduction
A desired state in sustainable development is when the society is happy with the living conditions provided through its resource utilization without jeopardizing the stability of the natural ecosystem (James, Magee, Scerri, & Steger, 2015). Haughton (1997) have used self-reliance, redesigning the city, external dependency, and the equitable balance to formulate sustainable urban development models. Sustainability indicators such as Monocle's Quality of Life Survey, Quality of Life Index (QLI), Sustainability indicators for European Green City Index, City Blueprint (Kaklauskas et al., 2018) are used to assess a city’s quality of life. Comprehensive scorecards have been developed using quantitative and qualitative parameters (Cruz & Marques, 2014). Klopp and Petretta (2017) have highlighted the complexity involved in measuring the sustainability. Studies carried out by researchers have identified the exhaustive list of sustainability criteria which are presented in Section 2.1. However there is no study found in the literature so far to gauge whether the investments made in a sector is for sustainable development of a nation taking into account the importance of the sustainability criteria. This is very important from a nation’s perspective when the stakes involved are very high as well as when the consequences of such decisions affects multiple people. Normally in our daily decisions, we usually weigh multiple criteria and implicitly take decisions based on intuition. When problems becomes more complex, it become necessary to explicitly evaluate the conflicting multiple criteria in a structured manner so that the final decision represent the intuitionistic decision. The paper presents a comprehensive model that uses fuzzy AHP to determine the weights of the sustainability criteria, fuzzy VIKOR to rate the various sectors based on the importance of sustainability criteria while DEA determines whether the sectoral investments are appropriately budgeted and how it can be improved for sustainable development.
Section snippets
Literature review
A review is carried out on the various sustainability criteria / indicators and MCDM methods that are being used to assess sustainability.
Methods
The research plan for this paper is given in Fig. 1. There are three stages involved in this study : fuzzy AHP, fuzzy VIKOR and DEA analysis.
Fuzzy AHP
The questionnaire was given to ten experts. The experts were asked to do pairwise comparison of the sustainability criteria. The consistency ratio has to be determined for each expert. The response received for pairwise comparison from the first expert was converted to a matrix form given in Table 5.
Using consistency indices and random indices, consistency ratio (CR) was determined for expert 1 and it was found to be 0.0429. Similarly the CR value was found for the ten experts. The responses of
Discussions
The weights for the sustainability criteria are given in Table 8. It is found that almost all the experts have rated basic amenities as the most important criteria for sustainable development. the next highly rated criteria being environmental concern. It is found that nearly 40% importance is given to these two criteria for achieving sustainable development. With regard to quality of life all the experts have given very low rating for this criterion. It may be because experts could have felt
Conclusions
Sustainable development satisfies the present needs without compromising the requirements of the future generations while balancing the economic, environment and social criteria. In this paper sustainable criteria were identified and the important criteria were determined for a country’s sustained growth. The weights indicated that basic amenities and environmental concern were the most important criteria. Also the study indicated that when policies are framed to improve these criteria, it will
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