“Describing the elephant”: A framework for supporting sustainable development processes

Sustainable development and participatory governance are among the central policy priorities of our time. The challenge is at all scales of development and participation. Finding and validating methodological approaches has become urgent.Existing decision processes such as multi-criterion decision analysis (MCDA), multi-objective decision making (MODM), life cycle assessment (LCA) and cost-benefit analysis (CBA) are frequently used, with varying degrees of satisfaction reported. It appears that sustainable development can be assessed and analysed in different ways, any of which may be of use but none of which seems to be complete. The use of all, however, appears to involve such complexity as to be not feasible.There is a need for a more integrated and systematic approach to decision-making. In this paper, existing decision aid processes and frameworks are reviewed, and a novel evolutionary approach is proposed that can support them all.