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.,-\ ()~~ . May 2003 4.0 Ranking and Weighting Exercises After a review of the consequence table, stakeholders participated in a structured values elicitation process. There are three main reasons to use structured methods to elicit stakeholder values and preferences: to increase the accuracy and consistency of individual stakeholder judgments to increase the accountability and transparency of decisions by making the trade-offs made by stakeholders explicit to provide focus for constructive deliberations and refinement of the options. There are many ways to elicit values. Different methods usually produce different results; no method is necessarily right. The use of multiple methods provides insight to the decision by thinking about it in different ways. By examining choices from different perspectives, stakeholders will have more confidence that their choices reflect their values, and are not the result of methodological bias. The methods used in the workshop were selected because: They have a strong theoretical basis and are technically defensible; They are simple to understand and easy to process, with a quick turnaround time; They produce results in a format that support constructive deliberations; They have a strong track record of success, having been used in support of stakeholder deliberations at nearly 20 hydroelectric facilities in British Columbia, Canada. For the GCDAMP pilot, stakeholders conducted two ranking and weighting exercises: Direct Ranking Swing Weighting In Direct Ranking, stakeholders were asked to rank and then score each management option directly, In swing weighting, they were asked to rank and weight each attribute. The term "swing" weighting is used because decision makers are asked to say which attribute they would most want to "swing-up" from its worst to its best value. This is important because in some cases an attribute may be important in a general sense, but the actual change in the attribute value that results from the choice among management options may be relatively insignificant; this should affect the weight assigned to it, Attribute weights were entered into the following equation that computed an overall score for each option: SCORE(a) = W,(x,,) + W,(x'a) + ...... Where: SCORE(a) W"Wz... X1, Xz... = the calculated score for a management option (e.g. 'a') = the weight of an attribute = the scaled impact of a given option on each attribute Ranks for each management option for each stakeholder were then derived, GCDAMP MATA Pilot: May 2003 Workshop Report 5