A comparative analysis of the sustainability of rice cultivation technologies using the analytic network process

Sustainability of local farming systems and technologies is a very important issue that faces notorious measurement difficulties. Multi-criteria methods may help researchers to solve empirical problems in the construction of composite sustainability indicators and in ranking agricultural technologies according to their sustainability. This paper shows how a multi-criteria decision-making technique, the Analytic Network Process (ANP), can be fruitfully employed to this end. Contrary to simpler and hierarchical goal-criteria-alternative approaches, in ANP all the elements in the network can be related in any possible way, which means that a network can incorporate feedback and interdependent …