A FUZZY DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM TO ENHANCE STAKEHOLDERS' PARTICIPATION IN WATER RESOURCES MANAGEMENT

The Integrated Water Management (IWM) stresses the interrelationships among different types of management actions at different levels of influence, coordinating the stakeholders? behaviour. Consequently, the stakeholders? involvement in any decision making process is a key point in the IWM. Such a managerial approach, based on the stakeholders' participation, recognizes the inherent systemic complexity of the environmental management and the importance of mutual learning, conflict management, and iterative and adaptive decision-making processes as means for dealing with such a complexity. A successful watershed management process has to be participatory, allowing the stakeholders working together to set criteria for sustainable management, to identify priorities and constraints, to evaluate possible solutions, to recommend technologies and policies, and, finally, to monitor and evaluate any possible impact. These processes are often affected by conflicts of interest, which need to be solved through a joint negotiation among the involved stakeholders. For these reasons, any kind of support for handling a fair, rational and efficient debate and for achieving agreements and compromises is strongly desirable. In this contribution, an electronic agora system, capable to facilitate both the meeting among different stakeholders involved or interested in a water management decision and the negotiation process among them, is described. Obviously, involving different actors in any managerial process, means to respect their point of view of the considered problem. The proposed system is a reliable tool to assist individuals and groups in representing and communicating their own perspectives. Furthermore, the system can support in creating the, so called, "communities of interests", which gather all the stakeholders having similar needs. In this research work, the definition of "fuzzy semantic distance" between the judgments expressed by each stakeholder is used as a clustering method. The resulting clusters are, then, used for a cooperative solution of the problem. The validation phase is made applying the system to a watershed in Apulia region, selecting different stakeholders with their management tasks and interests.