Strategic Management Plan Evaluation of a River Basin District

Purpose: In strategic planning and management of environmental resources, traditional multicriteria analysis are usually adopted for evaluating alternative development scenarios against a set of criteria. However, the modeling of the problem is often inadequate to represent the complexity which characterized the decision. For overcoming this problem, this paper suggests the application of an advanced version of the Analytic Hierarchy Process: the Analytic Network Process (ANP). Methodology: The ANP is the first mathematical approach that makes possible to systematically deal with all kinds of dependencies and feedback among elements. It requires the identification of a network of clusters and nodes, as well as pair-wise comparison to establish relations within the network elements. The number of comparisons is dependent upon the number of interrelations among the elements. Findings: The method is applied to the Strategic Management Plan of River Po Basin, in Italy. The result obtained is a surprising ranking which places major weight to the cultural heritage and landscape rather than to traditional environmental categories, such as land and water. This result reflects the recent River Po Basin Authority strategy to institute an integrated and coordinated policy action in the field. Originality/value. The proposed approach has improved the integration of the strategic evaluation in the decision making process within the management of territorial development policies, thanks to a better representation of the interrelations among issues within the decision model