EURO 2025 Leeds
Abstract Submission

631. Methodological adaptivity and design choices to support decision-making in a citizen participation program

Invited abstract in session MD-61: Behaviour in group decision making, stream Behavioural OR.

Monday, 14:30-16:00
Room: Maurice Keyworth G.31

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Hubert Korzilius
Institute for Management Research, Radboud University
2. Femke Bekius
Nijmegen School of Management, Radboud University
3. Mats ter Horst
Institute for Management Research, Radboud University

Abstract

Despite good intentions, top-down projects to increase the quality of living in cities often fail. Therefore, citizen participation in decision-making is increasingly applied, but knowledge about how to organize and design citizen participation in decision-making is scarce. We show experiences of ongoing action research in a city-wide neighborhood program, where citizens work together with professionals and municipality officials on decision-making in interventions to promote quality of living. We adapted the methodological approach to fit a running process and the needs of the participants. Our system’s approach combined Group Model Building and Multi-Criteria Decision Analyses in multiple group sessions. Several methodological issues played a role, such as the dynamics between stakeholders showing the need for a stakeholder analysis beforehand; multiple data sources and participants missing sessions, which queried model comprehensiveness; and a high degree of interrelated leverages (e.g., language skills, self-reliance, citizen meetings) make it difficult to develop interventions. In the presentation, we show how these methodological issues were addressed and present considerations in the design of these interventions supporting the decision-making process to increase citizens’ commitment and sense of ownership, to eventually implement change.

Keywords

Status: accepted

Back to the list of papers