Dealing with the Complexity of Stakeholder Interaction in Participatory Transport Planning

Including an active participation of citizens and stakeholders from the beginning of transport decision-making processes is widely recognized as a precondition to avoid the failure of projects/policies/plans as a consequence of a lack of consensus. Appropriate methods and tools are needed to support participation processes towards well-thought and shared solutions. In this paper quantitative methods, stakeholder interaction and simulation models are used to guide and reproduce a participatory experiment aimed at consensus building about mobility management strategies. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) has been used to elicit stakeholder preferences, different voting methods have been used to aggregate the individual preferences, group interaction has been performed via a facilitated dialogue to reach a consensus among stakeholders and an agent-based model (ABM) has been used to simulate the same consensus building process. Besides the social network of stakeholders has been analyzed to gain insights on its influence on the consensus formation. The results of this integrated procedure, applied in a pilot experiment with University students as stakeholders, provide useful suggestions on how to use different methods and guide effective and efficient participation processes aimed at consensus building.