Constructing fuzzy composite indicators to support water policy entrepreneurship

Composite indicators play a very useful role in supporting international policy entrepreneurship, helping to inform decision-making processes and to address conflicts between countries. In this paper we present a Fuzzy Data Envelopment Analysis (Fuzzy-DEA) model to construct composite indicators based on time series under the Pressure-State-Response (PSR) approach in order to evaluate water security in 10 European water security hotspots. First, we identified nine indicators within the PSR framework. Second, we aggregated the indicators in each PSR set using a Fuzzy-DEA model. Finally, we compared the PSR results under pessimistic, optimistic and neutral scenarios. Results show that, overall, Bulgaria achieved the best pressure, state and response performance. In terms of responses, Spain registered the best performance after Bulgaria, despite the fact that it suffers from the highest pressures of all the analyzed countries. Estonia achieved the best state performance in all three scenarios, but worse results in responses than Bulgaria and Spain. Cyprus and Belgium registered the highest variability for pressures, Spain for state and Portugal for responses.

The model was able to pinpoint the problems that political strategies and urgent actions should seek to tackle, while providing information regarding the variability of the indicators over time.