MCRIT approach to feasibility and impact assessment studies

Feasibility studies are conducted to determine the degree to which the design or location of a given investment project (e.g. rehabilitation of rural roads) is justified from an social, economic and environmental perspective (socioeconomic and environmental feasibility), or an eventual construction and operation can be financed and managed by public/private institutions (financial feasibility). We believe that best feasibility studies are not meant to just approve or reject a given project, but should contribute to improve its engineering design, suggesting possible ways to increase its positive outcomes while reducing its costs and negative impacts whenever possible.

MCRIT has participated in many feasibility and road design studies

We believe that environmental impact assessment tools (e.g. EIA, SEA Environmental Impact and Strategic Environmental Assessment) and social and economic feasibility measures (e.g. CBA Cost-Benefit) are complementary tools, useful if provide meaningful information to support decision-making processes. MCA (Multicriteria) framework provide for a more general method to make project design and evaluation more systematic and transparent.

MCA is a method to aggregate the possible outcomes related to a given decision according to pre-defined preferences (in its easier form, preferences can be expressed as weights attached to the indicators measuring all relevant decision criteria). In MCA is possible to include impacts not easily monetarised, or even not easily quantifiable. In CBA when goods or services have no market prices, “shadow prices” have to be estimated indirectly, instead.