Toolbox

This activity is carried out by the technical team and seeks to prioritise the list of projects based on the results obtained in the two previous activities. The prioritisation helps to determine which projects are the most strategic to implement, considering that their execution must address multiple challenges that the city faces, they must also respond to various objectives and strategies of the plan, as well as their feasibility.

As a starting point, the team should define the criteria, such as: prioritisation/participatory acceptance, plan objectives addressed, benefits (economic, social, environmental), institutional costs, financial costs, implementation time and technical feasibility. One way to evaluate such criteria can be with an Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP), in which project alternatives are evaluated by assigning a numerical value (ideally no more than 5) to each criterion set. This ensures that they are all evaluated in the same way and can be compared. This exercise ultimately results in a ranking of projects, where those with the highest scores are given the highest priority. 

Although the criteria for evaluating projects may be the same, the prioritisation process will ultimately be different for each city, according to the challenges, objectives and priorities faced. The benefits and impact that each project brings will have different values in different contexts. For example, an intermediate coastal city that constantly faces disaster and climate change risks will likely value a nature-based flood prevention solutions project more highly than a non-coastal metropolitan city. 

After the exercise, the technical team adds up the score of each project and assigns a relative ranking to identify those that will make up the strategic project portfolio. Ideally, this will be made up of no more than 10 priority projects. This exercise can also be replicated to prioritise the initiatives the strategy framework.