Multicriteria Mapping Manual: Version 4.0

This MCM Manual offers basic advice on how to do multicriteria mapping (MCM). It suggests how to: go about designing and building a typical MCM project; engage with participants; analyse results; and get the most out of the online MCM tool. The online MCM software tool provides its own operational help. So this Manual is more focused on the general approach. There are no rigid rules. MCM is structured, but very flexible. It allows many more detailed features than can be covered here. MCM users are encouraged to think for themselves and be responsible and creative. But there are some key underlying MCM values. The most crucial are as follows: 1) Inclusion: MCM aims to promote more inclusive, equitable and accessible appraisal. This means engaging in a respectful and balanced way, with a diversity of relevant perspectives – especially those most often marginalized. 2) Opening Up: MCM aims to help ‘open up’ appraisal. This means giving balanced attention to exploring and illuminating contending views. Using MCM just to aggregate a single final view has the effect instead of ‘closing down’. 3) Agency: MCM aims to ‘put participants in the driving seat’. An MCM project should be designed, implemented and analysed to maximise the agency of participants over the ways in which their own perspectives are represented. 4) Transparency: MCM only ‘opens up’, if results are conveyed fully and clearly to all parties with an interest in debates over the focal goal. Depending on context, this means publishing results and giving reasonable access to data. This Manual gives advice on how these values can best be realised in practice.