Practicing Participatory Value Evaluation

Abstract

One of the pillars of Dutch municipal decision-making is to stimulate citizen participation in agenda- setting and decision-making (VNG, 2018). Involving citizens in the allocation of the public budget for addressing specific challenges is a novel approach to participatory decision-making. This thesis examines the applicability of the Participatory Value Evaluation (PVE) as a participatory budgeting tool to improve the economic assessment of investments with public funds on Urban Storm Water Management (USWM). The PVE method was developed by Mouter, Koster and Dekker (2017) to overcome the economical dispute on the use of consumer Willingness to Pay (WTP) for the valuation of investments with public funds. The PVE-method could be a valuable means to improve the assessment of public investment opportunities and facilitate participation in the decision-making process. However, due to a lack of experience with the actual application of the method in different sectors, scientists and practitioners lack the knowledge to understand whether and how the PVE- method can be applied in different fields and administrative levels of public decision-making. The PVE-method has so far only been applied twice; in a transportation study in the Metropolitan Region of Amsterdam (Mouter, Koster & Dekker, 2017) and in a national Water Safety study by the ministry of Economic Affairs in the Netherlands (Mouter, Koster, Dekker & Borst, 2018a, 2018b). These applications of the PVE-method are significantly different from applying the PVE-method to assess measures for USWM in terms of the scale level of the administration and specific characteristics of the USWM context. Therefore, the applicability of the PVE-method on a municipal level is assessed through the development of a case study in the municipality of The Hague that focused on the topical societal challenge of managing superfluous storm water in the urban environment. In this context, the application of the PVE could help to steer future investments in climate adaptation and USWM strategies, such that the highest value-for-money can be achieved.