Designing participatory decision support systems: towards meta-decision making analytics in the next generation of ecological economics

Recent research in decision science and decision support systems (DSS) has demonstrated that expert-systems based multi-objective decision making processes and models often fail to impact real-world environment and development policies. One-way communication of “optimal” solutions to broader set of political leaders and public does not necessarily influence complex environmental policy decision making processes and outcomes. This chapter introduces “wicked” versus “benign” decision making problems and provides a review of descriptive and normative DSS research to address meta-decision making problems. A decision theoretical framework on meta-decision models is presented that proposes iterative multi-stakeholder participatory mechanisms to explicitly illuminate the system-wide trade-offs that emerge when alternate meta-decision choices are made in evaluating environmental policy design conflicts. Theoretical and methodological implications for the next generation of ecological economics are drawn to inform the design and development of meta-decision making analytics in resolving wicked environmental design problems.