Multicriteria decision making for sustainable development: A systematic review

Abstract

Making decisions by integrating social and environmental concerns beyond the financial dimension involves complex decision-making processes in which innovative approaches and best practices need to be implemented. Recently, the literature on decision-making related to sustainable development has grown rapidly, and multiple criteria decision making or analysis (MCDM/A) methods appear to be the most widely used approaches. The general objective of this paper is to provide a systematic review of the literature on the use of MCDM/A in a sustainable development context. We carefully analysed 343 papers dealing with decision-making in sustainable development contexts published in the last 7 years (2010-2017) using MCDM/A methods. Descriptive statistics were provided to highlight the main trends and gaps in the literature, and future research avenues were presented. The results show that although sustainable development strives to achieve a balance between the short and the long term, most articles surveyed did not investigate either the long-term perspective related to sustainable development or the unforeseen events that could impact future project evaluations. Indeed, the need for temporal MCDM/A methods under uncertainty emerges as an important research challenge. In addition, results show that the social dimension was the most frequently ignored dimension. In future research, decision-making processes should closely investigate social well-being and encourage the participation of stakeholders (including the communities affected). Finally, the recent research on sustainability is relatively easy to implement but may not lead to the desired outcome. Future research needs to develop methods that promote sustainability without being overly difficult to implement in practice.