Conflict dissolution in the public sector: A case-study

The construction of a new railway link to the port of Lisbon has been postponed many times as a result of a conflict of different viewpoints held by various public stakeholders, namely between the municipality of Lisbon and the Lisbon Railway Node Bureau, while the Portuguese Railway Company has assumed a more flexible attitude. Over recent years, three groups of solutions, totalling nine alternative projects, have been proposed by each of these three actors, but none has been simultaneously accepted by all the three. The development of the urbanisation plan for Alcântara (the zone of the city where the railway line links to the port) has presented an opportunity to try to dissolve the conflict. This paper describes the multicriteria approach followed to support the creation of a new ‘good’ (win–win) compromise solution by the planning team based on the study of the consequences of the existing alternatives. In particular, we describe the structuring phase of the study and the use of a disaggregation–aggregation approach to take into account the different value systems of the stakeholders.