Enhancing Decision-Making in Water Resources Management: An Innovative Assessment of Expert Consistency and Competence

In the assessment of principles and guidelines to achieve specific goals before strategies in water resources and related sectors are formulated, the quality of experts participating in making group decisions should be evaluated. This paper introduces an innovative approach designed to evaluate the quality of group members based on their consistency and deviations from the group's decision. The group members are considered as alternatives within a multi-criteria framework, employing several typical performance indicators as criteria to assess their competence and compliance with the group. Considering the policy-making, the paper provides a rationale for possibly excluding certain members from the decision-making process to prevent making unsustainable decisions. A case study is presented about the evaluation of the importance of six Ramsar sites in Serbia, facing imminent threats from water regime disturbances and climate change-induced droughts. Seven experts participated in the process and the results revealed that several experts displayed the poorest performance across all three prioritization schemes. This suggests the necessity for re-evaluating their judgments or considering their exclusion from the final decision-making process. The proposed assessment procedure holds promise for enhancing the potential to derive sustainable solutions in any complex and critical domain of water resources policy-making and strategic planning.