he second Vital Issues panel for the Senegal Water Resources Management Initiative met on August 29, 1997, in Dakar, Senegal. The panelists identified four issues that they considered vital to Senegal's water resource management and tested them using the metacriteria, listed below. They followed the Vital Issues Process format. (Panelists)

Necessary - elimination of the criterion from the list would allow some important aspect of the goal to go unrecongnized.

Operational - the criterion can be used by the next panel to assess the relative importance of issues that are vital to the management of Senegal's water resources.

The vital issues identified by Panel II are:

1. Insufficient knowledge about the quantity and quality of Senegal's water resources.
2. Ineffective strategies for managing Senegal's water resources.
3. Inadequate involvement of important Senegalese water resource stakeholders.
4. Ineffective implementation of integrated, cohesive legislation for managing Senegal's water resources.

After point/counterpoint discussions of the issues in the context of the four criteria, the panelists scored the four issues using pairwise comparisons. The scores were used with the criteria weights calculated from the results of the first Vital Issues panel meeting to determine the panel-averaged relative importance of the issues. The vital issues were evaluated in the context of the three criteria amplitude, frequency, and duration and in the context of the single criterion feasibility.

In the end, the issue with the highest value is the most desirable to address, and the issue with the lowest value is considered the least important.

The ordinal ranking of the relative importance of the vital issues for the composite was Knowledge > Strategies > Legislation > Stakeholders, and the ordinal ranking of the level of agreement in the relative importance of the vital issues was Strategies Legislation > Knowledge > Stakeholders. For the single criterion feasibility the ordinal ranking of the relative importance was also Knowledge > Strategies > Legislation > Stakeholders; for the level of agreement, the ordinal ranking was Strategies > Legislation Stakeholders Knowledge.

In Figure 1, the mean relative values for each vital issue for the composite ranking and for feasibility are plotted along the x and y axes, respectively. The center-points of the elliptical areas on the graph are the plotted means for the panel's assessment of the issues. The ellipses represent the range of the panelists' disagreement (one standard deviation above and below the mean) regarding the relative importance. The vital issues that have the highest values along both axes are the most desirable to address. Those with the lowest values along both axes are the least desirable.

The standard deviations also provide additional useful information. For example, note in Figure 1 that Strategies, the second-ranked issue category, has a narrower range of disagreement than the top-ranked issue, Knowledge, which was ranked third in the level of agreement as to its relative importance. A risk-averse decision maker might prefer to address Strategies before addressing Knowledge because of the lower overall disagreement regarding its relative value.

Figure 1. Integrated ranking of the issues vital to the management of Senegal's water resources.

For more information contact Dr. Dennis Engi, (505) 845-8284.

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