APPLICATION OF MORPHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS TO POLICY FORMULATION FOR WASTEWATER TREATMENT

Wastewater treatment, water protection and conservation, and rational water use are important elements of water management. The goals of water management are achieved by implementation of a set of appropriate policy measures creating a coherent policy. However; policy formulation is a complex decision-making problem involving a large number of stakeholders and many possible measures. The objective of this work is to implement a method for facilitating decision-making and identify suitable policy measures for the location and operation of wastewater treatment facilities. This type of problem is very complex and is usually formulated with many contradictory requirements. It is an example of a so-called wicked problem, for which the application of traditional multi-objective decision-making approaches has clear limitations. In this paper, Morphological Analysis (MA), an approach applicable to wicked problems, is used to structure policy measures relevant to the problem of the location and operation of wastewater treatment facilities. The application of MA enables identification and selection of stakeholders, decision-making criteria and policy measures to tackle legal, financial, technical, social and environmental aspects of wastewater treatment. A case study is presented to illustrate the identification of criteria and policy measures applicable to the location and operation of wastewater treatment facilities. Use of MA allows the decision-making process of identification and selection of appropriate policy measures to be structured and accelerated while simultaneously minimizing conflicts among stakeholders.