Eliciting stakeholder preferences through nonmarket valuation techniques

Session F3: Modeling with Stakeholders: Old Problems, New Solutions

To successfully predict the impacts of environmental change, modellers need to incorporate analyses of human behaviour into their predictions. The engagement of stakeholders, including participatory model development, is now widely advocated as an approach to account for stakeholder preferences. While participatory approaches are suitable to involve targeted stakeholder groups and technical experts, it is typically prohibitively expensive to engage a wide range of communities in the model development process. Many environmental modellers may be aware of social science research methods to participatory research. Socio-economic approaches to elicit stakeholder preferences are, however, less commonly used. This paper presents three stated preference techniques typically used by environmental economists to assess stakeholder preferences for environmental changes. These techniques use nonmarket valuation surveys to gain an understanding of the environmental issues, assets, and management options that are preferred by the wider community. The benefits and limitations of using nonmarket valuation techniques in environmental modelling are also discussed.