Decision aid in public administration: from evidence-based decision making to organizational learning

Multicriteria methods are often used to aid decisions in public administration, where different methodological approaches can be adopted to facilitate interventions for different problem situations. A general framework is here proposed to distinguish and visualize the main kinds of applications as well as to underline the main aspects of these applications, which deal with several complexities and obstacles and produce results that are often underestimated. Some specific applications are described and discussed in relation to the proposed framework.