A stakeholders-oriented approach to analyze the case of the UNESCO’s man and biosphere reserve CollinaPo

The paper investigates the combined use of storytelling and the Simos-Roy-Figueira (SRF) method to support the identification of the most important decision criteria in a decision process concerning a valorization strategy for a UNESCO’s MaB reserve. The approach is illustrated with an Italian case study (“CollinaPo”), describing one of the four focus groups where it has been applied, as part of a training course to discover and valorize the values and peculiarities of the area. The choice of a combination of storytelling and SRF has been also induced by the very varied composition of the workshop participants: the two methods are intuitive and entertaining, the latter in particular allows to select and weight the criteria on a subjective scale that stimulate the stakeholders’ acceptance. The fact that several common criteria arose across of different groups despite the limited time and the variety of the participants, seemed a positive indicator of the goodness of the choice. The participants pointed out this sense of “belonging” to UNESCO’s MaB reserve “CollinaPo” beyond the division into individual municipalities, expressing a clear vision of the need to act as a “network” on the territory to reinforce the attractiveness of the area. Even if the article illustrates the results of a single case, it incorporates a series of reasoning related to three workshops already done in the same project, and other applications are scheduled.