Pre-selecting appropriate sanitation system options as an input into urban sanitation planning

Structured decision making (SDM) frameworks such as CLUES and Sanitation21 support urban sanitation planning by prioritizing decision objectives, identifying decision options, quantifying consequences, clarifying trade-offs, and balancing for opposing stakeholder preferences. However, current research focusses on the selection of a preferred option, assuming that the options to choose from are already known. Given the growing number of sanitation technology and system configurations, as well as the multiple criteria that those should fulfil, providing a good set of decision options is far from trivial. In this paper we present an approach for the pre-selection of locally appropriate sanitation system options that: (1) is systematic and therefore transparent; (2) is based on stakeholder objectives, thus increasing ownership; (3) can deal with a large number of both conventional and novel options opening up the decision space; and (4) considers uncertainties related to novel technologies and the local conditions.