Internet Tools for Supporting of Lay Stakeholders in the Framework of the Democratic Paradigm of Environmental Decision Making

Journal of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis, v. 12, 145-142.

The paper describes the concept of Internet tools that may help implementing a democratic paradigm of environmental decision making, which is based on the desire to involve lay stakeholders into the process of decision making. It is clear that lay stakeholders usually have minimal knowledge on the ways how to solve environmental problems. The gap among knowledge and actions of lay stakeholders may be extremely dangerous. In this paper we propose visualization-based Internet tools that can help lay stakeholders to study the environmental problems and base their actions on a better understanding of the issues. The tools are based on multi-criteria exploration of the whole variety of possible environmental decision alternatives that helps to understand the feasibility frontiers and individual selecting several preferred feasible decision alternatives. We argue that such Internet tools can be mastered by computer-literate lay stakeholders and used by them in the process of preparation to political actions related to the final choice.