Myriam Merad

Using a multi-criteria decision aid methodology to implement sustainable development principles within an organization

The implementation of Sustainable Development (SD) within an Organization is a difficult task. This is due to the fact that it is difficult to deal with conflicting and incommensurable aspects such as environmental, economic and social dimensions. In this paper we have used a Multi-Criteria Decision Aid (MCDA) methodology to cope with these difficulties. MCDA methodology offers the opportunity to avoid monetary valuation of the different dimensions of the SD. These dimensions are not substitutable for one another and all have a role to play. There is an abundance of possible aggregation procedures in MCDA methodology. In this paper we have proposed an innovative method to choose a suitable aggregation procedure for SD problems. Real life case studies of the implementation of an outranking approach (i.e., ELECTRE) and of a mono-criterion synthesis approach (i.e., MAUT approaches based on the Choquet integral) were done to respectively rank 22 SD strategic actions within an expertise Institute and rank 20 practical operational actions to control energy consumption of the Institutes buildings.

Multiple-criteria decision-aiding framework to analyze and assess the governance of sustainability

Past and present disasters and scandals, such as the BP Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, the Servier Mediator (Benfluorex) scandal in 2009 and the Enron collapse in 2001, have uncovered weaknesses in governance issues. The authors argue that there is a need to develop methods and tools to diagnose and assess the governance of organizations with respect to Sustainable Development (SD). However, this task remains difficult due to the fact that it is difficult to appraise the quality of governance. The authors propose a protocol to diagnose and analyze the governance of SD and explore the use of multiple-criteria decision-aiding methods to achieve this task. Two aggregation methods to assess the global governance are proposed: (1) The identification of a final governance index for an Organization. This method helps in establishing a global diagnosis of the quality of the governance of an Organization with respect to SD challenges. The governance index is based on the calculation of three indexes: the partial opportunity index, the partial risk index and the partial equilibrium index. (2) The ranking of a set of Organizations according to their governance of SD. This method aims at assessing a set of Organizations based on a pairwise comparison according to a set of criteria that represents the seven domains of the ISO 26000 norm (ISO 26000—Guidance on social responsibility, 2010). This method is based on the outranking aggregation approach ELECTRE III. A practical example is used to illustrate two methods of governance assessment.

Comparative, collaborative, and integrative risk governance for emerging technologies

Various emerging technologies challenge existing governance processes to identify, assess, and manage risk. Though the existing risk-based paradigm has been essential for assessment of many chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear technologies, a complementary approach may be warranted for the early-stage assessment and management challenges of high uncertainty technologies ranging from nanotechnology to synthetic biology to artificial intelligence, among many others. This paper argues for a risk governance approach that integrates quantitative experimental information alongside qualitative expert insight to characterize and balance the risks, benefits, costs, and societal implications of emerging technologies. Various articles in scholarly literature have highlighted differing points of how to address technological uncertainty, and this article builds upon such knowledge to explain how an emerging technology risk governance process should be driven by a multi-stakeholder effort, incorporate various disparate sources of information, review various endpoints and outcomes, and comparatively assess emerging technology performance against existing conventional products in a given application area. At least in the early stages of development when quantitative data for risk assessment remain incomplete or limited, such an approach can be valuable for policymakers and decision makers to evaluate the impact that such technologies may have upon human and environmental health.

Sustainable Development and Climate Change Challenges

In 2007, the French government organized a set of meetings around environment and sustainable development problematics called, “Environment Grenelle”. The conclusions of these meetings were introduced in a new law published in August 2009 (“Grenelle 1,” n 2009-967). In Article 1 of this law, the State is obliged to frame a Sustainable Development National Strategy (SDNS) structured around nine challenges. The first challenge consists in fighting against climate change. The SDNS is used as a plinth for the involvement of public and private organizations in this perspective. Many practical questions are raised when struggling against climate change and implementing the sustainable development principle (SD Principle) within the organizational framework: How to develop adaptive methods and tools helping organizations reach a new balance facing environmental, economic, and social risks induced by those broad challenges? Are there any standards of reference and if not can we develop an innovative approach to support decision making within uncertainty? How to develop a dashboard to a proportioned allocation of resources adapted to the various stakeholders and level of decision within the organization? How to compare actions that can have different impacts in different subsystems and with different time frameworks? After a brief historical overview of the origin of the challenges of sustainable development and climate change, we will raise briefly, in the first part of the paper, some theoretical issues and discuss why struggling against such a global issue as climate change is a complex problem within an organization and how sustainable development principles can support decision making under uncertainty. In the second part, we will address practical issues for an organization facing the challenges of sustainable development and climate change. Indeed, we will relate the experience of framing a sustainable development plan within a public institution using an organizational approach and a multiple-criteria decision aid methodology. Finally, we will discuss the decision makers’ choices and the lessons learned by implementing an innovative approach that we set up to face these new challenges.

Social Resilience and Critical Infrastructure Systems

Resilience analysis and thinking serve as emerging conceptual frameworks relevant for applications assessing risk. Connections between the domains of resilience and risk assessment include vulnerability. Infrastructure, social, economic, and ecological systems (and combined social-ecological systems) are vulnerable to exogenous global change, and other disturbances, both natural and anthropologically derived. Resilience analysis fundamentally seeks to provide the groundwork for a ‘soft landing’, or an efficient and robust restoration following disturbance as well as the ability to reduce harms while helping the targeted system rebound to full functionality as quickly and efficiently where possible. Such applications are consistent with The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) definition of resilience, which more broadly denotes the field as “the ability to plan and prepare for, absorb, recover from, and adapt to adverse events” (Larkin S, Fox-Lent C, Eisenberg DA, Trump BD, Wallace S, Chadderton C, Linkov I (2015) Benchmarking agency and organizational practices in resilience decision making. Environ Sys Decisions 35(2):185–195). Given this definition, we seek to describe how resilience analysis and resilience thinking might be applied to social considerations for critical infrastructure systems. Specifically, we indicate how resilience might better coordinate societal elements of such infrastructure to identify, mitigate, and efficiently recover from systemic shocks and stresses that threaten system performance and service capacity.

Expertise processes in risk assessment and management: How to improve their governance and their conduct?

Major accidents and disasters, such as Fukushima in Japan (2011) and Aquila in Italy (2009), have significantly changed the conditions of public vigilance and their trust in so-called experts. They have also consequently questioned the legal liability of experts and have remobilized the scientific community in the way that the expertise process is conducted, governed and challenged. More robust, sound and reliable expertise processes are needed, and more transparency and accountability are asked for by the public. At the same time, the frontiers between expertise and decision processes must continually be reevaluated and subjected to possible public audits and scrutiny. This special issue on ‘‘Expertise, Risks and Decisions’’ in Environment Systems and Decisions suggests for the first time a multi-disciplinary contribution to this crucial subject with four main focuses: (1) on the use of social and human sciences to improve the robustness of expertise processes, (2) on how to bridge the gap between experts and other actors by using deliberative and participative approaches, (3) on expert judgment and information fusion and (4) on the use of decision-aiding methods. Maslen and Hayes (2014) and Tabibzadeh and Meshkati (2014) have suggested learning from major disasters and accidents such as the case of the Wivenhoe Dam inquiry following the Queensland (Australia) floods in January 2011 and BP Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico (2010), respectively. It is still surprising to notice that even in our contemporary world, expertise continues to be considered as a vox dei where no errors are tolerated and where the blame is considered as being the final sanction. The authors suggest that if we go beyond this omnipresent vision of expertise, possible improvements in expert practices and facilitation of organizational learning can be made. The so-called human and organizational factors in safety sciences, and how to mobilize human and social sciences in risk analysis and risk management, are the key for a more comprehensive learning from expertise and decision-making experiences in risky, uncertain and complex situations. Wachinger et al. (2014) and Arvai et al. (2014) have, respectively, proposed practical methods and case studies (public debate on hospital planning in Germany and a pressing international development problem in rural Costa Rica: management of the lucrative but also environmentally destructive pineapple industry) on how to make participative and deliberative democracy paradigms achievable in practice. They have, respectively, suggested innovative approaches to bridge the gap between experts, citizens and politicians. The authors have also proposed to organize the participative and/or the deliberative processes based on semi-formal or formal structured decision-making approaches and tools. With Baccou and Chojnacki (2014), Ha-Duong and Journe (2014) and Lannoy and Procaccia (2014), we return to some crucial problems in expertise such as information fusion in deep uncertainty, the assessment of the probability of a major accident and learning for operational practices and experiences by the use of expert judgment in safety and reliability engineering. Using practical and operational examples, such as natural risk problems in mountains in France and crisis management, Tacnet et al. (2014) and Kamissoko et al. (2014) close this special issue by sharing their experiences in framing structured approaches based on decision-aiding theories using multi-criteria methods, decision support systems methods and tools and information fusion approaches. M. Merad (&) INERIS, Paris, France e-mail: myriam.merad@ineris.fr