Analysing community-based initiatives for heating and cooling: A systematic and critical review

Energy communities are decentralized socio-technical systems where energy is jointly generated and distributed among a community of households locally. As the energy that is shared among the community is commonly electricity, the energy community's literature is dominated by electricity-systems and mostly neglects collective thermal energy as an...

Participatory value evaluation for the evaluation of flood protection schemes

Participatory Value Evaluation (PVE) is a new survey method which elicits citizens' preferences over the allocation of public budgets as well as their private income. In a PVE, citizens are asked to choose the best portfolio of projects given a governmental and a private budget constraint. First, this paper aligns PVE with the traditional Kaldor...

Citizen preferences regarding the public funding of projects promoting a healthy body weight among people with a low income

Overweight and obesity are a growing problem, especially among people with a low income. Policymakers aspire to alleviate this problem by implementing publicly funded projects. This study has three aims: 1) to explore citizen preferences regarding the public funding of projects promoting a healthy body weight among people with a low income, 2...

Contrasting the recommendations of participatory value evaluation and cost-benefit analysis in the context of urban mobility investments

Participatory Value Evaluation (PVE) is a new method to assess the desirability of government projects. In a PVE, individuals select their preferred portfolio of government projects given a constrained public budget. Individuals’ preferences for (the impacts of) government projects can be determined based on these choices. The obtained...

The Politics of Cost-Benefit Analysis

Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is a widely used economic appraisal method that aims to support politicians in making decisions about projects and policies. Several researchers have tried to uncover the extent to which CBA actually impacts decision-making by investigating the statistical relation between the results of CBA studies and political...

The value of travel time, noise pollution, recreation and biodiversity: A social choice valuation perspective

Environmental effects of transport projects have a weak position in Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) which might be rooted in the valuation approach adopted in the dominant style of CBA. This conventional valuation approach has been criticized for not valuing positive and negative impacts of transport projects in relation to each other and for not...

The consumer-citizen duality: Ten reasons why citizens prefer safety and drivers desire speed

Cost-benefit analyses for transportation projects usually value impacts on safety and travel time through experiments in which consumers of mobility (‘drivers’) choose between routes which differ in safety and travel time. This approach has been criticized for failing to consider that private choices may not fully reflect citizens’...

A critical assessment of discounting policies for transport cost-benefit analysis in five European practices

Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) has a long tradition as a broadly-used instrument for assessing transport infrastructure investments. In a CBA, the discount rate often determines whether a project passes the benefit-cost test. One concern is that literature on the subject offers widely differing recommendations regarding which discount rate...

Dutch politicians’ attitudes towards Cost-Benefit Analysis

In this study Dutch politicians were interviewed to derive their attitudes towards the use of Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) in the appraisal of transport projects. Dutch politicians’ attitudes towards CBA are positive on the condition that CBAs are carried out in an impartial way. According to politicians CBA improves the planning process,...

Dutch politicians’ use of cost–benefit analysis

28 Dutch politicians and 10 top-level civil servants were interviewed about the way Dutch politicians use cost–benefit analysis (CBA). Various types of use were identified. Politicians use CBA: (1) When forming their opinion about the desirability of transport projects; (2) As political ammunition (opportunistic use); (3) To make themselves...

Strategic Use of Analytical Information in Transport Planning in China: How Is It Different from Western Democracies?

Theory on the strategic use of knowledge in planning large infrastructure projects is comparatively well-developed in the fields of public policy and urban/transport planning for Western democracies. But how policymakers make use of knowledge and what position policy analysts hold in non-Western countries still remains largely unknown...

Towards improved handling of uncertainty in cost-benefit analysis: Addressing the ‘price-quality’ and ‘communication’ dilemmas

An important limitation of Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) is the inherent uncertainty in estimations of future welfare effects. In this paper, we argue that consideration of the ‘price-quality’ dilemma and the ‘communication’ dilemma is useful to explain and improve the handling of uncertainty in CBA. The ‘price-quality’ dilemma refers to the trade...

Cost-Benefit Analysis in Practice

In most western countries Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) is used to inform decision makers about positive and negative effects for society of transport policy options. However, the way CBA is perceived by different key individuals that use, carry out or study CBAs has received scant attention in the literature. This thesis aims to fill four...

Current issues in the Dutch CBA practice

In the Netherlands a guideline for carrying out a CBA for infrastructure projects (the so-called OEI-manual) was constructed in the year 2000. Since then a CBA in line with the OEI-manual became compulsory in the decision making process for all large infrastructure national projects. The aim of this research is to define the main problems in the...