Elsevier

Sustainable Cities and Society

Volume 43, November 2018, Pages 144-156
Sustainable Cities and Society

Multi expert and multi criteria evaluation of sectoral investments for sustainable development: An integrated fuzzy AHP, VIKOR / DEA methodology

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2018.08.022Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Identification of sustainability criteria / indicators for smart cities.

  • Quantification of sustainability criteria weights from multi expert judgement.

  • An integrated fuzzy AHP, VIKOR early defuzzification / DEA for ranking of sectoral investments.

  • Comparison of sectoral investments against criteria using decomposition efficiency.

  • Judicious decision making for sectoral investment to reach frontier efficiency.

Abstract

The 2030 agenda for sustainable development calls for a holistic approach. It needs to tackle multidimensional aspects such as poverty, inequality, inclusivity, skill development to name a few. In this paper, a multi expert multi criteria decision making approach is adopted using fuzzy AHP, VIKOR and DEA. The weights of the criteria are determined using fuzzy AHP and it is found that basic amenities is the most important (0.21) followed by environmental concern (0.18). Fuzzy VIKOR early defuzzification is used to rank the various sectors based on the importance of sustainability criteria. Science & technology is ranked first followed by rural development. Considering the investment made in each sector, fuzzy AHP DEA indicates water resources, river development & environment lies in the frontier efficiency region. The DEA analysis reveals that basic amenities, environment concern and governance system need to be focused upon for improving the efficiency score of science & technology from 92.2% to reach the frontier line efficiency. The integrated fuzzy AHP VIKOR presents the ranking considering only the sustainability criteria while fuzzy AHP DEA highlights whether the national investment is in tune with the sustainability criteria for sustainable development.

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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