Integrating social network analysis with analytic network process for international development project selection

• We study the link between social network analysis and project selection.
• We develop a multi-criteria model to integrate social network information into project selection.
• We calculate social network criteria from a research for development network.
• The presented model is extendable to a variety of project selection decision processes.

The social relationships between development agencies, non-governmental organizations, private companies, and other groups working on development projects play an important role in the overall success of projects. However, traditional project selection and prioritization processes ignore the organizational relationships. This paper proposes to integrate social network analysis into multi-criteria decision-making processes to enhance the effectiveness of project selection. A set of topological metrics of social network are used to quantitatively measure the organizational relationships and integrated into the analytic network process (ANP) to form a multi-criteria ANP project selection model. Utilizing empirical social network data of a water and food security research for development network in the Mekong River Basin, we investigate the effectiveness of the proposed model. The results show that it will offer companies, government agencies, and other donor organizations the opportunity to prioritize strategic network goals simultaneously with research and development priorities, and help companies and research organizations to increase their impact and reach within networks.