To support Sustainable Water Infrastructure Planning (SWIP), a participatory decision-making procedure was developed in the SWIP project at Eawag¹. This procedure is based on Structured Decision Making (SDM)², which guides stakeholders through different steps of the decision process: (1) clarify decision context (may include a stakeholder analysis); (2) define objectives and attributes; (3) develop alternatives; (4) estimate consequences; (5) evaluate trade-offs and select alternatives; and (6) implement, monitor and review.
The SDM application to water infrastructure planning was developed in close collaboration with stakeholders in a case study near Zürich, Switzerland. The experienced advantages and disadvantages of the first steps of the proposed procedure were discussed in a scientific publication by Lienert et al. (2014)³. We strongly encourage others to apply this SDM procedure for sustainable water infrastructure planning to their specific case. To this end, the approach was developed in a generalized way and we present more material covering the different steps of the SDM procedure in this working paper.
The here presented material includes different steps in the development of a comprehensive objectives hierarchy for water supply and wastewater management. The objectives are operationalized with attributes (indicators/ benchmarks), which are described in detail, including the ranges (best- and worst-possible case) and a description of the status quo. Four future scenarios were developed in a scenario planning workshop together with local stakeholders to capture socio-demographic uncertainty, which are again described in detail. Ten strategic decision alternatives were developed by stakeholders with help of a strategy generation table. These include the current system with central water supply and wastewater treatment plants, but also fully decentralized on-site options and different management strategies. The strategy generation table can be used to tailor decision alternatives for water infrastructure planning to other cases. Finally, we provide detailed feedback from the stakeholders for each step. We evaluate the proposed SDM approach and give recommendations for other applications.