BRIEF DESCRIPTION

Stakeholder-based Impact Scoring (SIS) is a participatory assessment method aimed at predicting the impact of a policy or project prior to its implementation by quantifying and visualising the negative and positive impacts on stakeholders. It leads to ‘impact scores’ based on objective assessments of effects from data or expert views, and the subjective weighting of these effects by the affected stakeholders. SIS is especially helpful when a decision is not about choosing the ‘best’ option, but about modifying and mitigating a project throughout the course of its implementation.

  • Enhanced Decision Support: Supports decision making and inter-stakeholder learning by providing insights into the impacts of projects and policies and the distribution of benefits and burdens.

  • Alternative Analysis Approach: Provides an alternative to cost-benefit analysis by disaggregating impacts to specific stakeholder groups and does not require a translation of effects into financial terms

  • Simplified Decision Scenarios: Does not require an exhaustive set of mutually exclusive decision alternatives but only one option and a do-nothing scenario (as opposed to Multi-Criteria Analysis).

  • Data availability: Like any model, accuracy of outputs depends on quality of inputs, but data for performance scores can be hard to find and will always be an estimate.

  • Participation: engaging a representative sample of participants can be hard and participants may not easily be able to identify or weight all impact factors.

  • Interpreting output: SIS is a tool to explore impacts, it does not ‘tell’ you what the impact of different options definitely will be.

EXAMPLE:

MOBRU: An elevated motorway in Brussels is heavily used by commuters, but needs costly renovation. It also generates lots of nuisance for neighbouring residents. Would it be wise to tear it down? How would residents, commuters and transport operators be affected? The MOBRU project explored this problem.

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