Environmental policies are implemented in complex socio-economic settings, where numerous stakeholders hold different and potentially conflicting values. In addition to being scientifically well-founded, the experts’ recommendations on which these policies are based therefore also need to be operational’and legitimate. Multi-criteria decision-analysis (MCDA) is often used to solve management problems, but studies in the literature rarely place importance on the way stakeholders perceive researchers’ interventions (which implies a lack of legitimacy), and most managers lack the skills to reproduce routinely the operations involved (which implies a lack of operationality). We use MCDA methodology in a different approach: “meta-decision-analysis” (MetaDA).
As researchers, instead of striving to identify the best way for us to solve managers’ problems, we identify the actors (the decision-aid providers, DAPs) who are best placed to help managers, and we provide DAPs with the necessary tools. Implementing this approach involves three tasks: T1—identifying a legitimate DAP who will provide decision-aid to managers in routine policy implementations; T2— identifying, among the decisions involved in solving managers’ problems, those for which managers and the stakeholders concerned consider that some actors have particular legitimacy; T3—designing tools that are compatible with both the DAP’s skills and legitimacy constraints.
We applied this approach, structured around T1–3, to wetland prioritization in a French administrative region (Bourgogne-Franche-Comté). This application illustrates the easibility and usefulness of our approach.
Our approach entails recommendations for various kinds of actors involved in environmental policies: For researchers, it provides a research agenda to develop new applications of MCDA. For managers and potential DAPs, it suggests that, for some of the problems they face collectively, they should seek the help of researchers to implement a Meta-DA approach. For policy-makers, it suggests that, by encouraging Meta-DA, for example through dedicated funding schemes, they could improve the effectiveness of environmental policies.

While the number of river restoration projects is increasing, studies on their success or failure relativeto expectations are still rare. Only a few decision support methodologies and integrative methods forevaluating the ecological status of rivers are used in river restoration projects, thereby limiting informedmanagement decisions in restoration planning as well’as success control. Moreover, studies quantifyingriver restoration effects are often based on the assessment of a single organism group, and the effects onterrestrial communities are often neglected. In addition, potential effects of water quality or hydrologicaldegradation are often not considered for the evaluation of restoration projects.We used multi-attribute value theory to re-formulate an existing river assessment protocol’and extendit to a more comprehensive, integrated ecological’assessment program. We considered habitat conditions,water quality regarding nutrients, micropollutants and heavy metals, and five instream and terrestrialorganism groups (fish, benthic invertebrates, aquatic vegetation, ground beetles and riparian vegetation).The physical, chemical’and biological states of the rivers were assessed separately and combined to valuethe overall ecological state.The assessment procedure was then applied to restored and unrestored sites at two Swiss rivers to testits feasibility in quantifying the effect of river restoration. Uncertainty in observations was taken intoaccount and propagated through the assessment framework to evaluate the significance of differencesbetween the ecological states of restored and unrestored reaches. In the restored sites, we measured ahigher width variability of the river, as well’as a higher width of the riparian zone and a higher richnessof organism groups. According to the ecological’assessment, the river morphology and the biologicalstates were significantly better at the restored sites, with the largest differences detected for groundbeetles and fish communities, followed by benthic invertebrates and riparian vegetation. The state of theaquatic vegetation was slightly lower at the restored sites. According to our assessment, the presence ofinvasive plant species counteracted the potential ecological gain. Water quality could be a causal factorcontributing to the absence of larger improvements.Overall, we found significantly better biological’and physical states, and integrated ecological statesat the restored sites. Even in the absence of comprehensive before-after data, based on the similarityof the reaches before restoration and mechanistic biological knowledge, this can be safely interpretedas a causal consequence of restoration. An integrative perspective across aquatic and riparian organismgroups was important to assess the biological effects, because organism groups responded differently torestoration. In addition, the potential deteriorating effect of water quality demonstrates the importanceof integrated planning for the reduction of morphological, water quality and hydrological degradation.