**4.3 Pertinence of Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) for top-down approaches**

MCDM has been identified in previous studies to be a pertinent method to use with experts (Mendoza and Prabhu, 2000b; Mendoza and Prabhu, 2000a; Andrada II and Calderon, 2008; Gomontean et al., 2008). It can save time to begin from a generic set and to modify it afterwards with local experts instead of generating new lists of indicators from scratch. MCDM is a method which easily helps to reach an agreement among all participants. The fact that in this study nearly no indicators were modified from the existent generic set could be explained in two ways. The first could be that the generic template, already resulting from several international processes and expert consultations, covered all requirements of the workshop members. Anyway, ecological elements have often been those where the most agreement appeared among stakeholders worldwide (Purnomo et al., 2005; Sherry et al., 2005). The second explanation could be that the method does not allow easy modifications of the generic template, for the following reasons. Providing a generic set resulting from several international consultations may make local experts hesitant to freely reject / modify elements. Moreover, even if MCDM allows the elimination of elements, the method is hardly adaptable to the addition of new topics.
