Multicriteria decision making for sustainable development: A systematic review

Abstract

Making decisions by integrating social and environmental concerns beyond the financial dimension involves complex decision-making processes in which innovative approaches and best practices need to be implemented. Recently, the literature on decision-making related to sustainable development has grown rapidly, and multiple criteria decision making or analysis (MCDM/A) methods appear to be the most widely used approaches. The general objective of this paper is to provide a systematic review of the literature on the use of MCDM/A in a sustainable development context. We carefully analysed 343 papers dealing with decision-making in sustainable development contexts published in the last 7 years (2010-2017) using MCDM/A methods. Descriptive statistics were provided to highlight the main trends and gaps in the literature, and future research avenues were presented. The results show that although sustainable development strives to achieve a balance between the short and the long term, most articles surveyed did not investigate either the long-term perspective related to sustainable development or the unforeseen events that could impact future project evaluations. Indeed, the need for temporal MCDM/A methods under uncertainty emerges as an important research challenge. In addition, resultsshow that the social dimension was the most frequently ignored dimension. In future research, decision-making processes should closely investigate social well-being and encourage the participation of stakeholders (including the communities affected).Finally, the recent research on sustainability is relatively easy to implement but may not lead to the desired outcome. Future research needs to develop methods that promote sustainability without being overly difficult to implement in practice. KEYWORDS multicriteria decision making or analysis (MCDM/A), sustainable development, temporal evaluation, uncertainty 1 | INTRODUCTION Today's decision-making processes evolve in a context in which sustainability is a major concern and decisions have to be made based on the triple bottom line. Decision processes should simultaneously take into account the economic, social, and environmental impacts of decisions within a long-term vision. Making decisions beyond the financial dimension by integrating social and environmental concerns involves complex decision-making processes in which innovative approaches and best practices need to be developed and implemented.As a major societal concern, sustainable development (SD) is now incorporated into the legislation of many countries around the world.

Multiple Criteria Decision Making for the Achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals: A Systematic Literature Review and a Research Agenda

“…Covering the time frame 2010 to 2020 and focusing more specifically on previous studies that employed the systematic literature review (SLR) approach to give a comprehensive overview of what has been done in the MCDM research field, a literature search was conducted accessing documents from the Scopus database. This search yielded 70 reviews, but only a few are concerned with MCDM applications for sustainable development issues [22][23][24][25][26][27][28]. Kumar et al (2017) [22] have reviewed MCDM techniques for renewable energy development.…”

“…Implications for research and practice, as well as promising challenges for further research, were presented. Kandakoglu et al (2019) [28] presented a systematic review of the literature on MCDM methods, covering 343 articles dealing with decision-making in sustainable development contexts, published in the period from 2010 to 2017. The selected articles were reviewed and categorized by MCDM approach, as follows: preference modeling, uncertainty approaches, sensitivity analysis, long-term assessment, and stakeholder involvement.…”

TSMAA‐TRI: A temporal multi‐criteria sorting approach under uncertainty

“…In Kandakoglu, Frini, and Benamor (2019), a systematic literature review shows that multi‐criteria decision aid (MCDA) emerged as the most commonly used approach for tackling decision making in a SD context. However, the MCDA methods used are static, and most research work does not address the long‐term (temporal) evaluations.…”

“…Accordingly, research in the field of environmental decision making is growing. In particular, the number of scientific publications addressing decision‐making situations in a sustainable development context has witnessed a rapid increase in the last 5 years (Kandakoglu et al, 2019). The MCDA is the most commonly used approach, but research addressing the long‐term (temporal) evaluations in a context of uncertainty are limited.…”

Multicriteria Decision-Making Methods for Sustainable Development: A Longitudinal Science Mapping Approach

“…According to Arksey and O'Malley (2005), a scoping review seeks to present an overview of a potentially large and diverse body of literature regarding a broad topic. It yielded 197 reviews, but only a few were concerned with MCDM/A applications for sustainable development issues (Kandakoglu et al, 2019;Sousa et al, 2021;Santos et al, 2019;Kumar et al, 2017;Qauser et al, PUC-Rio -Certificação Digital Nº 1912688/CA 2017;Mardani et al, 2016;Minhas and Potdar, 2020;Bertoluzzi et al, 2021;Rigo et a., 2020;Bhardwaj et al, 2019;Malek and Desai, 2020).…”