ABSTRACT
The decision-making process The fundamental premise of this book is that the aim of a project analysis is to inform decision-makers, enabling them to arrive at their own wellfounded evaluation of alternative projects – it is not the job of the analysis as such to provide final conclusions concerning which projects are best. The decision-making process I have in mind is of the following type: After considering the available information, each decision-maker decides which projects should, in her view, be given priority. Which projects are in fact implemented is then, in a next step, determined by some kind of aggregation of these decision-makers’ views. Which kind is not crucial here; this could, for example, be a majority vote in parliament, a decision by an organization’s representative on the basis of her subordinates’ views, or some negotiation process leading to either mutual agreement or negotiation breakdown. The important thing is that while the analysis may influence the views of individual decision-makers, who in turn influence the final decision, the final decision itself is made neither by the analyst nor by a single dictatorial decision-maker. I have in mind a kind of process where many decision-makers need to make up their minds, and where these decision-makers might disagree about which project is preferable from a social welfare point of view even if they were fully rational, benevolent, and informed. That is not to say that decision-makers are fully rational and benevolent. If decision-makers are stupid, corrupt, or simply do not care, society may obviously have a problem. It is much less obvious that the analyst, or the project analysis as such, can alleviate that problem. If final decisions are made by decision-makers, not by the analysis, decision-makers are of course free to simply disregard the entire analysis. It is hard to see that a project analysis, in a process like the one described above, can offer more than an opportunity to make well-founded judgments.
