ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the procedures of Social Judgement Capturing--Adaptive--Goals--Achievement--Environmental assessment (SAGE) and reports the results of a trial application of the method to a watershed management problem in a growing urban area. One of the most common pitfalls of previous methods is the blurring of facts and values. SAGE avoids this pitfall by tabulating the values held by various groups, rather than aggregating the results into a single index of societal values. SAGE consists of four tasks: predicting the physical, chemical and biological attributes of alternative actions; scaling the attributes into accounts of beneficial and adverse effects on objectives; eliciting relative value weights that individuals or groups attach to each objective; and presenting the findings in a form useful to decision makers. Environmentalists only weighted environmental quality heavily. Cost-conscious environmentalists strongly supported environmental quality, but exhibited some concern for economic and fiscal costs.
