From Technocratic to Participatory Decision Support Systems: Responding to the New Governance Initiatives

Abstract

This paper examines more than 10 years of developments in decision support systems (DSS) for environmental issues (waste management, water management, land-use planning, etc.) by a research group at the Joint Research Centre (JRC). In the earlier days the group developed some computer systems, aiming at decision makers understood as experts, whose requirements were often not obvious (many times imagining them as computer and systems literate), featuring expert knowledge databases and multi-criteria engines and requiring skilled users to undertake the analysis. Those were highly technocratic systems because they would not take into account the social context in which decisions were taking place, deploying mainly scientific information. The group has evolved the concept of the DSS through the years, the latter approach viewing it as a "context" or a "platform" for helping all those involved in decision making processes to access the necessary information for a useful debate to take place. This is in line with the new styles of governance, arising from the science and governance initiative in Europe. Newer DSS developments are still computer tools, carefully designed for the audience they aim at and placed into a social process instead of embedding the social process into the system. This paper will discuss this evolution and will demonstrate the group's new principles for conceiving and designing DSS.

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