Distributive fairness considerations in sustainable project selection

Abstract

This work develops general fairness measures that may be used as criteria for sustainable project selection. Sustainable development, fair allocation objectives and empirical distance-based measures of fairness, and their evaluation are discussed. Generalized fairness measures are developed and extended for both intratemporal and intertemporal fairness comparisons. A preliminary application of the extended distance based fairness measures is then performed for a case study of the selection of an electricity supply project. The case study involves selecting between a dispersed diesel energy supply and centralized energy supply with land line energy distribution. Due to data limitations, the perceived fairness is measured in terms of the annual energy costs per megawatt-hour that result from implementing each alternative. The applied fairness measures indicate that intratemporal fairness, in terms of the distribution of user unit costs, may be increased by choosing the land line alternative and that there is no significant difference among alternatives with respect to intertemporal fairness. These results provide limited insight into the energy supply problem, however, and it is suggested that further analyses should be conducted when information regarding the environmental impacts and reliability of power supply for each of the alternatives becomes available. © 1997 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.