The Regional Spatial Plan for the Algarve, approved in 2007, was the first spatial plan made in Portugal which has included an innovative participatory process to support the formulation of the regional development strategy. A Multicriteria Decision Aid (MCDA) approach involving all the relevant public sector institutions and NGO was adopted to identify and prioritize the policies adequate to achieve the proposed Vision. This approach proved to be fruitful in ensuring not only the true involvement of all stakeholders, but also the understanding about the specific scope of each decision area and each set of policies and its operational objectives, but also of the concrete actions/measures that detail each policy. Each policy was evaluated by panels though a series of decision conferences which allowed quantifying the value of the direct and cross impacts of each policy, based on the elicitation of qualitative panel judgements about the relative benefit of those impacts. Also based on qualitative judgements, this decision conferencing process has also included the quantification of the level of ‘doability’ of each policy, considering technical, financial, institutional, and political constraints affecting their implementation. Finally, a debated formulation of recommendations about the more attractive policies was made, considering the extent to which they contribute to achieve the objectives and their ‘doability’. More specifically, the MACBETH multi-criteria approach was used to elicit the qualitative judgements by the experts of the several panels, for each sub-set of policies, and reconcile them to automatically generate two ratings for the policies. On the one hand, a rating designated by impact-value measures the value of each policy in terms of the contribution (of its impacts) to the achievement of each objective. These were weighted also using MACBETH in order to reflect their relative importance for the achievement of the Vision, therefore enabling to calculate overall impact values of the policy measures to support the final decision process. On the other hand, a 0 to 1 ‘doability’ rating enabled to the establishment of priorities from the ratio level between the overall impact values and the effort (the complement to 1 of the doability rating) required to implement each policy. The resource allocation process was made by the planning team only after the establishment of priorities, both in terms of budget(s) and agents. The actions programming (very short, short, medium and long terms) was the outcome of this process.
