Strumenti per il processo decisionale pubblico

Public intervention is necessary in decision processes involving environmental and land issues, because the market mechanism is not able to regulate automatically environmental goods. The methods historically introduced to deal with these decisions are cost benefit analysis, cost effectiveness analysis and multi objectives analysis. The origins and criticalities of these methods are shortly pointed out in the paper. These methods become inadequate in a complex society: subjectivity and conflict are key elements, and participation is needed in the decision process. SEA and EIA are procedures which define the roles of the different actors; decision support systems use the techniques elaborated in cost benefit analysis, cost effectiveness analysis and multi objectives analysis to create and spread the information, facilitating communication and interaction among the different actors and making the whole process transparent.