In this step, relevant stakeholders for conducting the pilot are identified. The stakeholders to involve are the representatives of groups that are impacted, or can impact, the pilot project (see step 2 under Co-creating and utilizing scenarios). An indicative list of stakeholders which can be used as starting point can be found in the SPROUT stakeholders inventory .

For the SIS process it is crucial that stakeholder groups have an understanding of their objectives (i.e. what they find important), such as reducing transport-related air pollution, reducing the number of accidents, or barrier-free public transport. A clear statement of objectives is required. Stakeholder groups can have several objectives.

The key task for stakeholders in this step is to derive criteria for the following question: what distinguishes a good project alternative from a bad one?

Criteria are linked to objectives. They are those aspects that stakeholders find most important when assessing the impact of a pilot project and/or a policy intervention. Different stakeholder groups find different criteria most important. Criteria can be both positive and negative. Examples include traffic safety, cost, or accessibility.

Within SPROUT, the alternatives that stakeholders were asked to reflect upon were the pilot situation without policy interventions versus the pilot situation with the proposed policy alternatives.

Due to the Covid pandemic, which restricted face-to-face workshops, stakeholders were asked to provide their criteria via email. The request letter provided a short description of the pilot without policy changes, and a short description of the pilot including the policy alternatives. The stakeholders were asked to come up with two to six criteria that would make the implementation of the pilot situation in combination with policy interventions successful, in their eyes.

An overview of the criteria per stakeholder group for Budapest can be found in the table below.

Example: Budapest use case 2: criteria per stakeholder group.

The next step of the SIS is an evaluation of the impacts of alternative policy interventions (from Step 1) on these criteria. In SPROUT, the assessment was carries out by research partners in the project.

In this step, the effects of the pilot with policy implementation are compared to the pilot without policy changes for each of the criteria. The alternative is given a performance score on a 7-point scale, ranging from ‘Very negative’ to ‘Very positive’.

The key question to answer in this step is the following: in terms of each criterion, what would be the impacts (direction and magnitude) if the pilot was implemented in combination with the policy alternative, compared to the pilot implementation without the policy alternative?

The table below shows the results of an expert evaluation for the Valencia use case intermodal bike parkings (excerpt).

This step contains the attribution of weights by the stakeholders to ‘their’ criteria. To evaluate the relative weightings, stakeholders were asked to rate the importance of each criterion they suggested in Step 3 on a scale from 0 to 10.

An example of the Kalisz use case can be found below:

This step consists of aggregating the contribution of each identified policy alternative to the criteria across all stakeholders. Concretely, every identified policy alternative is evaluated on the different criteria by the use of the indicators and the measurement methods, and this is done for each stakeholder.  This is done by multiplying the weight of a criterion, as attributed in step 5, with the impact, as assessed in step 4. This impact score will be either positive or negative, and will fall between +1 and -1.

The following example shows the results for SPROUT’s Valencia Pilot: intermodal bike parkings:

This step consists of the ranking of the identified policy alternatives, with each alternative’s weak and strong points. This classification of the alternatives is done by the MAMCA software. This helps decision-makers by providing a comparison of the various alternatives. The last step of the MAMCA is a consensus-making step, where stakeholders involved find a compromise so that the decision-maker can then select the policy option that resulted as being most favourable. The idea behind this step is to find the best policy alternative based on the synergies and conflicts that were identified.

Policy responses that were selected in the different pilot cases are specified in the section “Respond”