ABSTRACTRESOURCE MANAGEMENT IN A DEVELOPING COUNTRY CONTEXT: IMPROVING DECISIONS BY CONFRONTING DIFFICULT TRADEOFFS IN COSTA RICAByDelanie Suzanne KellonThough laudable and necessary, the international development field's recent shift toward more holistic approaches and methods presents a significant challenge to governments and stakeholder groups throughout developing regions of the world. The presence of critically important--but often conflicting--social, economic, and environmental objectives in decision making for international development point to the inevitability of some difficult tradeoffs; the need to give up something valued in order to gain something else that is also valued but for different reasons. This dissertation seeks to better understand, and gauge the effectiveness of, two approaches for confronting these kinds of tradeoffs in an international development context. Presented in three chapters, the dissertation begins by using insights from the decision sciences to discuss ways to address common pitfalls in decision making about the environment. The second and third chapters then report results from research that draws on these concepts and explores two approaches for confronting environment-development tradeoffs in Costa Rica: (1) a stated choice (SC) approach that relies upon conjoint analysis and (2) a decision analytic method based on insights from multiattribute utility theory. In addition to responding to policy oriented research questions, the second and third papers also set the stage for future analysis of both approaches from a methodological perspective.
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