Different levels of stakeholder participation for sustainability Impact Assessment Tools - A comparative requirement analysis of four research approaches

In the last decade, a wide range of new modeling approaches has been developed for sustainability impact assessment. They are often based on theoretical concepts on how to cope, process and apply pre-assessments on policy and project instrument-implementation. Experiences show that few models reached immediately a fully operational state ready to provide applied policy advice. Expertise on models and programming skills is often not available. Additionally, the geographical focus plays a crucial role in the success of any assessment approaches. Given the assumption that research should be demand-driven, this paper gives an overview on experiences from several European and international projects with regard to the demand of end users and the supply of research. The determining factors of these framework conditions (e.g. regional conditions towards skills, user demands, project designs, data availability of resources) are analysed, which drive decisions to select components within a "tool box". A decision tree is designed which is based on our experiences which ease an adequate, region and condition-explicit selection of tool-box components tailored for sustainability impact assessments. The paper critically reviews the concepts of the presented tools towards its success factors needed to conclude on adequate participatory stakeholder involvement.