Feasibility versus sustainability in urban water management.
Decision making in urban water management is exemplified by the case of Austria: Although researchers define a comprehensible concept of sustainability, practitioners emphasize feasibility and accept limitations in sustainability. Could the specification of particular methods, chosen from some decision support methodology, remedy this situation? While an integrative assessment of sustainability should not be based on prescribed or standardized criteria, or even a certain assessment method, it should force the decision makers to make their chosen premise more visible. To this end a change of the decision making process is proposed, which will allow the decision makers to adapt the decision making process to the circumstances of a specific project in a way that is accepted by the stakeholders.
Starkl
Markus
M
Department of Sanitary Engineering and Water Pollution Control, University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences, Muthgasse 18, 1190 Vienna, Austria. markus.starkl@boku.ac.at
Brunner
Norbert
N
D002947:Cities; D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources; D003657:Decision Making; D005240:Feasibility Studies; D018505:Waste Management; D014881:Water Supply