Voting methods in strategic forest planning — Experiences from Metsähallitus

Voting methods were used by Metsähallitus in a real strategic participatory planning case in a regional working group context. The general aim of the study was to find out whether learning and collaborative decision making could be adequately supported by using the voting methods in the regional stakeholder group. Approval voting (AV) was used to select the evaluation criteria of the alternative strategies, Borda count method and cumulative voting were used to rank the stakeholders' decision criteria and the multi-criteria approval (MA) voting was used to multi-criteria evaluation of the alternatives. Plurality voting was used in public meetings to point out the best plan candidate. In general, the voting methods used were found to be easy to understand and their results transparent, which makes them user-friendly in the participation context. The applied voting methods also promoted learning and decision making in the planning process. Other lessons of the study stresses the key role of the plan alternatives in taking over the planning situation and in learning the trade-offs between different goals. Participants' preference elicitation should not be carried out before the trade-offs have been learned. Furthermore, instead of using criteria averages as approval borders in the MA voting, the approval borders should be specified by the participants of the working group.