Stakeholder participation in prioritizing sustainability issues at regional level using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) technique: A case study of Goa, India

Abstract This study involves stakeholders in prioritizing and ranking themes and sub-themes relevant to assess regional scale sustainability. Three themes – social, economic and environment were identified as parent themes to assess sustainability the key stakeholders identified 18 sub-themes to assess these three themes in detail. The key stakeholder groups of elected representatives (panchayats), government, industry and non-governmental organizations (NGOs)/academia, have been involved to assign weights to the themes and the sub-themes of the SDI, keeping the regional priorities in mind. Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), a decision-making technique has been used to prioritize and rank the various themes and sub-themes. Goa, one of the states of India, which has performed well on national level SDI developed as part of the earlier study ( Kwatra et al, 2016 ), was taken as the case study to assess sustainability issues at regional level. It was found that all the stakeholder groups gave nearly equal importance to the three themes of sustainability – environment (38%), social (32%) and economic (30%), environmental theme was apparently given slightly higher weights. Among the sub-themes, livelihood received highest weight (11%), followed by waste management (8%), and environmental budget (8%). Issues like waste management, unemployment, forests and biodiversity, governance which are of local importance were given higher weights by the local stakeholders over the national level priority issues like climate change, air pollution, health and literacy etc. The study proposes and tests a methodology which can be applied at a regional scale to assess and prioritize key sustainability issues so that policy makers can take informed decisions.