A proposal for structuring and evaluating problems for participatory decision making in sanitation context

In Brazil, the cities disordered occupation has caused a huge deficit in the sanitation sector, with direct impacts on public health, becoming one of the major environmental problems. Therefore, in 2007, the Brazilian National Sanitation Law introduced the society participation in decisions regarding to the reduction of the sanitation problem, in order to get the population involved with the choice and the implementation of the alternatives for the problem. However, this participation is ill structured and many difficulties are found to achieve a final decision, besides, there is no specific model for this. So, the aim of this paper is to propose a group decision model based on two central themes: structuring and evaluating problem. The former is based on SODA (Strategic Options Development and Analysis) to improve the learning process and to identify the alternatives that could be implemented to reduce the sanitation problem. The latter is performed by Copeland method, which aid to rank those alternatives and to choose the one that represents the best society compromise. An illustration of the proposed model is shown in this paper, applying with three decision makers from sanitation sector.