Paper/Poster/Presentation Title
Incorporating scenarios of value change in robust decision making using Cross-Impact Balances
Keywords
Value change; Deep uncertainty; Scenario discovery; Cross-impact balances; Value sensitive design
Start Date
15-9-2020 4:40 PM
End Date
15-9-2020 5:00 PM
Abstract
The aim of this work is to demonstrate how scenarios of value change can be incorporated in robust decision making. The deployment and operation of energy infrastructures frequently lead to protests from the public (Wüstenhagen et al., 2007). To address stakeholder concerns, approaches in ethics of technology such as Value Sensitive Design (Friedman et al., 2006) aim to embed values into technological designs. This is done through specification of design requirements and policy guidelines. A difficulty scarcely addressed by this literature is how to account for future value change (Van de Poel, 2018). Values to which designs need to comply to accommodate stakeholder concerns may change over time. For example, stakeholders may have changing understandings about what different values entail. Also, new stakeholder groups affected by an energy infrastructure may emerge. Scenarios can be useful to discover plausible future pathways of value change. The discovery of scenarios of value change is however deeply uncertain. Value change results from a combination of technical, economic and social factors. This includes technological breakthroughs, changing national welfare and socio-demographic changes. In this case, knowledge about system elements and their interactions is typically limited making it difficult to discover scenarios of value change using purely mathematical models. A more adequate exploratory tool for qualitative scenarios is Cross-Impact Balances (Weimer-Jehle, 2006), which relies on qualitative descriptions of a system’s structure to build scenarios. In this work, we show how Cross-Impact Balances can be used to discover scenarios of value change and contribute to robust decision making. This is done using a case of district heating deployment in the Netherlands. With this work, we provide an interdisciplinary qualitative-quantitative contribution by exploring the potential of scenario tools in ethics of technology.
Incorporating scenarios of value change in robust decision making using Cross-Impact Balances
The aim of this work is to demonstrate how scenarios of value change can be incorporated in robust decision making. The deployment and operation of energy infrastructures frequently lead to protests from the public (Wüstenhagen et al., 2007). To address stakeholder concerns, approaches in ethics of technology such as Value Sensitive Design (Friedman et al., 2006) aim to embed values into technological designs. This is done through specification of design requirements and policy guidelines. A difficulty scarcely addressed by this literature is how to account for future value change (Van de Poel, 2018). Values to which designs need to comply to accommodate stakeholder concerns may change over time. For example, stakeholders may have changing understandings about what different values entail. Also, new stakeholder groups affected by an energy infrastructure may emerge. Scenarios can be useful to discover plausible future pathways of value change. The discovery of scenarios of value change is however deeply uncertain. Value change results from a combination of technical, economic and social factors. This includes technological breakthroughs, changing national welfare and socio-demographic changes. In this case, knowledge about system elements and their interactions is typically limited making it difficult to discover scenarios of value change using purely mathematical models. A more adequate exploratory tool for qualitative scenarios is Cross-Impact Balances (Weimer-Jehle, 2006), which relies on qualitative descriptions of a system’s structure to build scenarios. In this work, we show how Cross-Impact Balances can be used to discover scenarios of value change and contribute to robust decision making. This is done using a case of district heating deployment in the Netherlands. With this work, we provide an interdisciplinary qualitative-quantitative contribution by exploring the potential of scenario tools in ethics of technology.
Stream and Session
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