A participatory decision support system for contaminated brownfield redevelopment: a case study from France

Abstract

Currently, participatory evaluation processes using multicriteria decision aids are barely used in the context of contaminated sites, even though they are a powerful tool for supporting land-use decision-making. The aim of this paper is to show how to apply such a participatory evaluation process (mixed methods) to the redevelopment of a contaminated brownfield site in France. Following the Model for the Operationalization of Democratic Evaluation (MODE), we designed a participatory process that enabled stakeholder empowerment to implement participatory multicriteria evaluations. We show that the (Elimination and Choice Expressing Reality) ELECTRE I method can be used to select consensus-based brownfield redevelopment projects and that such a participatory process can be implemented to ensure that feasible, coherent, and transparent choices are made for other brownfield redevelopment processes.

Keywords:

• brownfield
• ELECTRE
• group decision
• multicriteria decision aid (MCDA)
• participatory evaluation

Acknowledgements

The work of the first author benefited from a Ph.D. fellowship funded by the French Environment and Energy Management Agency (ADEME) and the “Pays de la Loire” region (2014–2017). In addition, group decisions were carried out with the financial support of the regional project POLLUSOLS (2015–2019). We would like to thank the head of the “Organisations, Sociétés et Territoires” department and Sebastien de Villèle for reviewing the English manuscript. In fact, we would like to thank all funding parties for their financial assistance. We are grateful to Didier Margot (ADEME) and Marc Perez (ADEME) for providing technical information regarding the brownfield site. We thank all the stakeholders of the municipality of “La Possonnière” for their availability. We also thank the local administration of this municipality for their valued assistance in carrying out this study. We also thank the anonymous reviewer whose comments helped to improve and clarify this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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