A Multi-Criteria and Multi-Actor Perspective for the Evaluation of Sustainability Services

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to study the challenge of the evaluation in the context of the services. Because of their specific nature the traditional evaluation methods and measures are not able to capture neither the diversity of the innovations nor the multifaceted dimensions of performance. This paper aims to contribute to the need for a more diverse evaluation approach. We focus on the context of service innovation in the environmental sector, in which we develop further multi-criteria and multi-actor perspectives. The multi-criteria framework describes the impacts of sustainability services and the multi-actor framework aims at analyzing the impacts from the perspective of various actors involved. Thus, our study provides a two dimensional approach to assess the impacts of services. The focus is on understanding the dynamics of service creation in the environmental sector, and on using new evaluation methods and indicators in that sector.