Agricultural sustainable management: a normative approach based on goal programming

This paper has two goals. It aims, first, to explore how the use of goal programming (GP) techniques within a Simonian-bounded rationality context can be an operational framework for dealing with the sustainable management of agricultural systems. Second, it goes on to apply this type of theoretical framework to a case study related to the sustainable management of irrigated agriculture in the Spanish Monegros District, where GP models are used to establish sensible compromises among economic and environmental criteria. doi: 10.1057/palgrave.jors.2602588 Published online 19 March 2008 Keywords: bounded rationality; environmental criteria; goal programming; irrigated agriculture; multiple criteria decision making; sustainability