Citizen participation about energy policy is organized for substantive, normative and instrumental reasons. Myriad factors influence how these rationales and goals are shaped and attained. Of these factors the influence of the socio-political context in which participation is organized remains poorly understood, as most approaches to engaging society focus on discrete participatory events. This paper addresses this knowledge gap by providing insights into how the level of government at which participation about the energy transition is organized influences the goals and rationales of politicians, policymakers and citizens. Seven similar cases are compared – all based on the Participatory Value Evaluation (PVE) method – in which 28,000 citizens advised their national, regional or local government about the sustainable energy mix. In all cases, most citizens worry about climate change and support sustainable energy objectives. However, different energy mixes are advised, and different values prevail in the motivations participants provided for their advice across multiple levels of government. Evaluative survey questions indicate citizens have more elaborate rationales and higher expectations when engaging in local participatory processes, which are most frequently criticized for their narrow scope. Finally, we observe local governments put most effort into satisfying multiple rationales for conducting participatory processes, based on 6 group discussions and 6 interviews with involved politicians and policymakers. Finally, we discuss the policy implications of the observed gap between citizen and government rationales across multiple levels of governments, arguing there is a need for aligning participatory processes in meaningful and effective participatory repertoires spanning across levels of government.

This study explores perceived accessibility specific to air transportation in the Dutch context through a focus group study. Five focus group sessions were held with a total of 24 participants with air travel experience within the past five years. Online focus groups were held during the period that the COVID-19 pandemic travel restrictions were in effect, specifically around 12 months after the travel restrictions were implemented globally. In terms of the importance of activities accessible by flight, we observe that travelers particularly attach importance to visiting family and relatives, while the importance attached to the business and recreational activities accessible by flight varies among participants. As far as the transport component of accessibility is concerned, we find that, in addition to conventional variables in air transportation research, such as cost and travel times, unconventional variables such as uncertainty during flight schedule disruptions or the mood of staff and other passengers contribute to perceived accessibility by air transportation. Based on the results, we further discuss characteristics specific to perceived accessibility by air transportation, directions for further qualitative and quantitative research regarding perceived accessibility by air transportation, and implications for policy and planning.

Since the 1940’s, job evaluation methods are being used to establish the relative value of jobs within organizations in order to determine salaries. Job evaluation methods have been studied, but there has not been much systematic reflection on the research conducted so far. This scoping review of 199 articles demonstrates that topics changed over decades, starting with methodological questions in the 1940’s, reflecting a start-up period. Historic overviews on wage policies appeared in the 1960’s, and the topic of gender wage inequality in the 1980’s. Guidelines were published in the 1990’s. From 2000 onwards, the main topic was adapting job evaluation methods to specific contexts. Research declined since 2010. There was hardly any research on appending changes in job evaluation methods and criteria. Given the ever-changing nature of work and the upcoming demographic changes, we recommend to revive scientific research on job evaluation and propose an agenda with research questions.

Objective: In many countries, the incidence of skin cancer is growing rapidly, resulting in a substantive health and economic burden. While the wide range of available skin cancer prevention policies may have large individual and societal benefits, many countries still lack a policy strategy, and little is known about public preferences for collective prevention policy measures. We elicited these preferences using a discrete choice experiment (DCE) in Austria, the Netherlands, and Spain to inform policy action. Methods: Respondents were asked to choose twelve times between two packages of different prevention policies. Each package was described by its estimated effectiveness and costs. Before and after the DCE, respondents were asked for their support for any policy action. We quota-sampled adult citizens in each of the countries from an online panel (N = 2,442). The choice data were analyzed using multinomial logit (MNL) and mixed multinomial logit (MMNL) models. Results: Almost all attributes significantly influenced respondents’ choices, with the tax attribute being most influential in each country. Among the six policy measures, information campaigns and a price reduction of sunscreen were the most preferred policy measures, and the prohibition of solar bed sales and solaria the least preferred. Preference structures were largely consistent across the countries. Finally, most respondents supported policy action, particularly after the DCE. Conclusions: Citizens in the three countries recommended their governments to take policy action against the increasing incidence of skin cancer. The results provide policymakers with directions for publicly supported policy action, which should be complemented with additional information on preference heterogeneity, citizens' argumentation, and policies’ relative (cost-)effectiveness. The suggestion that preferences for policy action adapted over the course of completing the DCE survey should be further examined.

Bert van Wee, professor in Transport Policy at Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands, faculty Technology, Policy and Management, is retiring. Given his large contributions to EJTIR as Editor-in-Chief, editorial board member, author and reviewer, this Editorial Note is dedicated to his work for EJTIR. Over 25 years, van Wee published 18 papers and 1 book review in EJTIR covering a wide range of topics from road pricing to urban rail transport, vehicle automation and port throughput. What his studies have in common is that they explore how transport policies affect land-use and travel behaviour, as well as the economic and wider societal impacts of those policies. Bert van Wee’s generalist view on the transport system is rare, but, given the rising complexity of the system, increasingly needed to indeed be able to address the future challenges.

Participatory value evaluation (PVE) is a novel method aiming at the evaluation of projects from a societal perspective. It aims at establishing which investment projects or investment portfolios (with a portfolio containing multiple investment projects) are likely to be favored by the population, given a limited budget. The approach emulates the decision-making problem faced by policy-makers. The ultimate end of PVE is to evaluate and establish how individuals value attributes of public projects in order to construct social trade-offs between different attributes and investments projects. However, it is important to consider that when investment portfolios consist of more than one investment project, significant synergies (positive and negative) may exist among the projects. This paper proposes a new evaluation framework that allows addressing synergies among projects in the context of PVE, while also offering a highly flexible structure. The approach is tested making use of one synthetic and two real datasets. Results show that neglecting synergies among the utilities of the projects included in the chosen portfolio majorly reduces the model fit and biases the estimators.

Several studies examined what drives citizens’ support for COVID-19 measures, but no works have addressed how the effects of these drivers are distributed at the individual level. Yet, if significant differences in support are present but not accounted for, policymakers’ interpretations could lead to misleading decisions. In this study, we use XGBoost, a supervised machine learning model, combined with SHAP (Shapley Additive eXplanations) to identify the factors associated with differences in policy support for COVID-19 measures and how such differences are distributed across different citizens and measures. We use secondary data from a Participatory Value Evaluation (PVE) experiment, in which 1,888 Dutch citizens answered which COVID-19 measures should be imposed under four risk scenarios. We identified considerable heterogeneity in citizens’ support for different COVID-19 measures regarding different age groups, the weight given to citizens’ opinions and the perceived risk of getting sick of COVID-19. Data analysis methods employed in previous studies do not reveal such heterogeneity of policy support. Policymakers can use our results to tailor measures further to increase support for specific citizens/measures.

Face validity indicates to what extent participants are engaged in making choices; and understand and interpret the information presented to them in the study as intended by its designer. It is an important but often overlooked aspect of the overall validity of choice experiments and no comprehensive instruments for assessing it are available. Improving the design of choice experiments potentially improves the quality of participants’ responses, which increases the relevance and usability for policy and practice. In this study we developed and tested an instrument to assess the FAce validity of Choice Experiments (FACE) in a uniform, systematic manner. The instrument is based on nine components that are used to define face validity identified from literature: acceptance, clarity, completeness, familiarity, feasibility, legibility, relevance, sensitivity, and transparency. FACE covers these components in 14 questions with 5-point Likert scales on which participants can indicate their level of agreement. 1,020 participants completed the instrument following a discrete choice experiment on COVID-19 pandemic preparedness measures in the Netherlands. This first application of FACE showed that the face validity of a choice experiment was determined by whether participants considered its study design to be relevant, reliable and feasible. Moreover, we found that relevance and reliability were most strongly related to characteristics of the survey design, while feasibility was most strongly related to participants’ socio-demographic characteristics. Face validity was assessed high(er) by participants who were younger, male, lower educated, vaccinated against COVID-19, supportive of policy responses to a pandemic situation and sufficiently engaged in the experiment.

Background: The outbreak of COVID-19 was followed by an unprecedented package of measures to protect public health. Over 150 countries mandated school closures to reduce the risk of transmission. Decisions on whether to close schools involve trade-offs between important effects on public health, learning outcomes, well-being of children, productivity of parents. Objectives: Investigate Peruvian citizens’ preferences for schools opening during a public-health crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic in two scenarios: (i) when the threat from COVID-19 is low and schools are open; and, (ii) when the threat from COVID-19 is high and schools are closed. Methods: We conducted a Participatory Value Evaluation (PVE) from 22 September to 17 October 2022, on which 2007 respondents assessed which policy measures to implement in the two scenarios. (i) In Scenario 1 “Schools are open”, children go to school, teachers and parents go to their jobs, but children still experience learning deficits from previous school closures. (ii) In Scenario 2 “Schools are closed”, children cannot go to school and do not receive any formal teaching, leading to learning losses; many teachers must change careers; and, many parents have to stay at home to take care of their children and lose income. Respondents were shown a range of policy measures in each of the scenarios and received information about the effects of each measure on public health, children's well-being and learning loss. Results: We found that most respondents in Scenario 1 preferred mandatory vaccination for teachers and quarantine measures. In Scenario 2 we found that most respondents were positive towards reopening school policies. In both Scenarios respondents prioritized mandatory vaccination and quarantine measures over other mitigation measures. In Scenario 2, most respondents from the Highland region selected opening schools with 100% on-location teaching while hybrid teaching was mostly selected in the Coast region. Most respondents (82%) evaluated PVE as a good method to involve citizens in policy decision-making. Conclusions: Policies that focus on prevention (e.g. mandatory vaccination for teachers and quarantine measures) can count on substantial support in a scenario when schools are open. The strong preference for opening schools with a noticeable difference in the way classes are provided (e.g. teaching on location most preferred by respondents from the Highlands and hybrid teaching by respondents from the Coast) show the importance of introducing differentiated strategies among regions.

The goals of transportation planning have been broadened in the last decades. Scholars increasingly argue to include goals such as reducing social exclusion and providing a minimal level of accessibility to all in the appraisal of transport policies. We conducted a Participatory Value Evaluation (PVE) with 6,784 Dutch citizens to investigate how different segments of the Dutch population prioritize these goals against other goals of transportation planning. In the PVE, participants indicated for 14 accessibility and mobility goals whether they thought a goal should receive more attention or less attention, subject to a budget constraint. We find that respondents recommend the government to pay the most attention to goals related to providing a basic level of accessibility for everyone such as ‘being able to access important facilities easily’, ‘being able to reach places affordably’ and ‘accessibility for people with disabilities’. Participants think that safeguarding these accessibility standards should be a core government task. They particularly prioritize improving accessibility to healthcare facilities such as hospitals and general practitioners. Participants think that the government should give relatively little attention to other goals such as ‘reducing travel times’, ‘being able to access different jobs’, ‘more pleasant and comfortable travel’ and ‘improving connections to other countries’. Many participants do not think that achieving such goals should be a core task of the government. They believe that the responsibility for achieving these goals lies more with citizens themselves, or with the market.

The importance of public participation in transport planning continues to increase. Participatory Value Evaluation (PVE) is a relatively new instrument to involve citizens in transport planning. In a PVE, citizens are put into the shoes of a policymaker and see which polices are considered, the impacts of the policies and the constraint that the policymaker faces. Subsequently, citizens are asked to advise the policymaker on which policy options should be chosen and why. So far PVE has been successfully applied in contexts in which citizens and stakeholders broadly agreed on the pursued policy goals. It is, however, unclear whether PVE is equally valuable in contexts in which stakeholders have conflicting interests. This paper investigates whether deploying PVE in an institutionalized transport conflict results in similar benefits and costs as in contexts where stakeholders pursue the same goals. We studied a PVE application in which 2466 participants provided recommendations to the government about decision-making regarding Schiphol Airport, the Netherlands. Stakeholders were involved in many phases of and decisions on the PVE design process. The aim of this research was twofold. First, to establish whether the benefits of applying PVE in an institutionalized transport conflict outweigh the costs. Second, to develop an instrument to assess the face validity of PVE as experienced by participants. We find that PVE can provide similar benefits in the context of an institutionalized conflict compared to cases in which such a conflict was absent. Citizens participated who normally do not participate and the PVE produced useful outcomes for decision-making. However, a notable difference is that the design phase of the PVE involved several feedback rounds which made it much more time-intensive than other cases. Hence, the benefit that PVE requires low time investment of civil servants that emerged in other studies was not applicable when applying PVE to an institutionalized transport conflict setting. Furthermore, stakeholders could not agree on various design choices of the PVE. To satisfy the diverging requests of stakeholders a very lengthy PVE was constructed. As a result, the satisfaction among participants about its face validity was relatively low.

Many countries face rapidly ageing populations, resulting in a rising demand for long-term care (LTC) for older people and an increased pressure on LTC systems. In responding to this development, governments face challenging trade-offs between different policy measures and their effects. To inform allocation decisions, this study elicited citizens’ policy preferences for LTC for older people in the Netherlands in 2040. We conducted a constrained portfolio choice experiment, in which 997 respondents composed a portfolio of their preferred policies, subject to a budget constraint, while being presented with the expected effects of their choices. Choices were analysed using a Multiple Discrete Continuous Extreme Value (MDCEV) choice model and a Latent Class Cluster Analysis (LCCA). The results suggest a preference for distributing resources towards multiple policies, including both nursing and social care, over investing heavily in one or two particularly. Also, most respondents chose portfolios constituting a substantial public expenditure increase, suggesting a widespread willingness to accept a tax increase to allow for this. Preferences were particularly heterogeneous with respect to expenditure levels and the adoption of supportive care technologies and compulsory social service for young adults. Policymakers may use these results to support the selection of a portfolio of LTC policies that aligns with public preferences.

Many countries use Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) as an ex-ante evaluation method to support transport decision-making. A critique on CBA is that it favours policies which produce easy to monetize impacts (e.g. travel time savings), whereas it disfavours policies which produce difficult to monetize impacts (e.g. minimum level of accessibility for people with a disability and environmental effects). Public willingness to pay (WTP) experiments have been introduced to value difficult to monetize policy impacts. This paper investigates how citizens of the Transport Authority Amsterdam value nine social impacts of transport policies through five Public WTP discrete choice experiments. In the experiments, respondents were asked to choose between transport policies, trading of social impacts against a uniform tax increase. We show that participants particularly value that people can reach key facilities within 15 min and assigned a relatively low value to preventing delays. This suggests that citizens prioritize accessibility over mobility. We also observe that participants assign a significant value to all the nine social impacts and identify Public WTP metrics for all the impacts. This suggests that the Public WTP approach has to potential to resolve the critique on CBA that not all impacts can be monetized.

This paper presents a micro-econometric framework to analyse choice data from participatory value evaluation (PVE) surveys. In a PVE survey respondents receive, similar to stated choice surveys, information on the social impacts of public sector projects before choosing the best policy portfolio according to their preferences. Respondents’ choices are limited by governmental and private budget constraints. The PVE data format is characterised by a mixture of discrete and continuous choice data. Building on recent literature of Kuhn–Tucker models, particularly the MDCEV model, a range of methodological and econometric contributions are provided facilitating model estimation and policy evaluation. We derive a set of closed form choice probabilities explaining the choice for the optimal portfolio with public projects, private consumption levels and whether to spend the public budget in full or not. The proposed policy evaluation framework is centred around the notion of social welfare maximisation. The parameter estimates are used to derive the optimal public sector budget and the corresponding portfolio maximising social welfare, but also to rank the set of feasible portfolios given a restricted budget, including sensitivity analyses. The proposed framework is illustrated using an empirical example on urban mobility investments in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

In this article, the affiliation details for author Jose Ignacio Hernandez were incorrectly given as ‘Center of Economics for Sustainable Development (CEDES), Faculty of Economics and Government, Universidad San Sebastian, Lientur 1457, Concepción, Chile ' but should have been ‘Center of Economics for Sustainable Development (CEDES), Faculty of Economics and Government, Universidad San Sebastian, Concepción, Chile. The affiliation ‘Transport and Logistics Group, Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands’ for authors Jose Ignacio Hernandez and Niek Mouter was missing. The original article has been corrected.

Background: The stage of the pandemic significantly affects people’s preferences for (the societal impacts of) COVID-19 policies. No discrete choice experiments were conducted when the COVID-19 pandemic was in a transition phase. Objectives: This is the first study to empirically investigate how citizens weigh the key societal impacts of pandemic policies when the COVID-19 pandemic transitions into an endemic. Methods: We performed two discrete choice experiments among 2181 Dutch adults that included six attributes: COVID-19 deaths, physical health problems, mental health problems, financial problems, surgery delays and the degree to which individual liberties are restricted. We used latent class choice models to identify heterogeneous preferences for the impacts of COVID-19 measures across different groups of respondents. Results: A large majority of the participants in this study was willing to accept deaths to avoid that citizens experience physical complaints, mental health issues, financial problems and the postponement of surgeries. The willingness to tolerate COVID-19 deaths to avoid these societal impacts differed substantially between participants. When participants were provided with information about the stringency of COVID-19 measures, they assigned relatively less value to preventing the postponement of non-urgent surgeries for 1–3 months across all classes. Conclusions: Having gone through a pandemic, most Dutch citizens clearly prefer pandemic policies that consider citizens’ financial situations, physical problems, mental health problems and individual liberties, alongside the effects on excess mortality and pressure on healthcare.

Objective: Increasing healthcare expenditures require governments to make difficult prioritization decisions. Considering public preferences can help raise citizens’ support. Previous research has predominantly elicited preferences for the allocation of public resources towards specific treatments or patient groups and principles for resource allocation. This study contributes by examining public preferences for budget allocation over various healthcare purposes in the Netherlands. Methods: We conducted a Participatory Value Evaluation (PVE) choice experiment in which 1408 respondents were asked to allocate a hypothetical budget over eight healthcare purposes: general practice and other easily accessible healthcare, hospital care, elderly care, disability care, mental healthcare, preventive care by encouragement, preventive care by discouragement, and new and better medicines. A default expenditure was set for each healthcare purpose, based on current expenditures. Respondents could adjust these default expenditures using sliders and were presented with the implications of their adjustments on health and well-being outcomes, the economy, and the healthcare premium. As a constraint, the maximum increase in the mandatory healthcare premium for adult citizens was €600 per year. The data were analysed using descriptive statistics and a Latent Class Cluster Analysis (LCCA). Results: On average, respondents preferred to increase total expenditures on all healthcare purposes, but especially on elderly care, new and better medicines, and mental healthcare. Three preference clusters were identified. The largest cluster preferred modest increases in expenditures, the second a much higher increase of expenditures, and the smallest favouring a substantial reduction of the healthcare premium by decreasing the expenditure on all healthcare purposes. The analyses also demonstrated substantial preference heterogeneity between clusters for budget allocation over different healthcare purposes. Conclusions: The results of this choice experiment show that most citizens in the Netherlands support increasing healthcare expenditures. However, substantial heterogeneity was identified in preferences for healthcare purposes to prioritize. Considering these preferences may increase public support for prioritization decisions.

The question of human control is a key concern in autonomous military systems debates. Our research qualitatively and quantitatively investigates values and concerns of the general public, as they relate to autonomous military systems, with particular attention to the value of human control. Using participatory value evaluation (PVE), we consulted 1980 Australians about which values matter in relation to two specific technologies: an autonomous minesweeping submarine and an autonomous drone that can drop bombs. Based on value sensitive design, participants were tasked to enhance the systems with design features that can realize values. A restriction (limited budget) in each design task forced participants to make trade-offs between design options and the values that these options realize. Our results suggest that the ‘general public’ has diverse and nuanced stances on the question of human control over autonomous military systems. A third of participants that is opposed to autonomous military systems when asked directly, selected different combinations of design features realizing varying degrees of human control. Several contextual factors, technology-specific concerns, and certain values seemed to explain these different choices. Our research shows that a focus on human control might overlook other important values that the general public is concerned about, such as system reliability, verifiability, and retrievability.

The need for engaging citizens in climate policymaking is increasingly recognised. Despite indications that the form of expert involvement can strongly influence participatory processes, this remains scarcely researched. We analysed two unique and contrasting cases of citizen engagement in national climate mitigation policy: (1) the Irish Citizens’ Assembly (ICA), the first national climate assembly involving live expert presentations and face-to-face deliberations; and (2) the Participatory Value Evaluation (PVE) on Dutch climate policymaking, where more than 10,000 citizens compared policy options in an online environment based on expert-based information on policy effects. Taking a dramaturgical approach, we found that the opening up and closing down of policy options and perspectives was influenced by the setting, staging and scripting of expertise. Apart from providing information on policy options, experts had significant roles in design choices and formulating recommendations, which shaped citizens’ deliberations and policy advice. In deliberative processes, citizens’ deliberations can be further influenced by putting experts in a privileged spot and emphasising their authority, whereas in the setting of an online tool, experts’ design choices may be masked by the fact-like presentation of expertise. Future research should further investigate the role of experts and expertise across a wider range of practices. Nevertheless, we conclude that the high degree of required technical knowledge in climate mitigation policy naturally implies strong expert involvement, which concomitantly steers the results. Alternatively, we may search to enhance citizens’ engagement in guiding climate policymakers by focusing on citizens’ normative perspectives.

Participatory value evaluation (PVE) has recently been introduced in the field of health as a new method to elicit stated preferences for public policies. PVE is a method in which respondents in a choice experiment are presented with various policy options and their attributes, and are asked to compose their portfolio of preference given a public-resource constraint. This paper aims to illustrate PVE’s potential for informing healthcare decision making and to position it relative to established preference-elicitation methods. We first describe PVE and its theoretical background. Next, by means of a narrative review of the eight existing PVE applications within and outside the health domain, we illustrate the different implementations of the main features of the method. We then compare PVE to several established preference-elicitation methods in terms of the structure and nature of the choice tasks presented to respondents. The portfolio-based choice task in a PVE requires respondents to consider a set of policy alternatives in relation to each other and to make trade-offs subject to one or more constraints, which more closely resembles decision making by policymakers. When using a flexible budget constraint, respondents can trade-off their private income with public expenditures. Relative to other methods, a PVE may be cognitively more demanding and is less efficient; however, it seems a promising complementary method for the preference-based assessment of health policies. Further research into the feasibility and validity of the method is required before researchers and policymakers can fully appreciate the advantages and disadvantages of the PVE as a preference-elicitation method.