This project is meant to explore decision making devices (instruments and procedures) and their role in dealing with conflicts between (incommensurable) values as they arise in the process of public decision-making concerning the sustainability of projects with major impact on environment. With the European Union Directive 2001/42/EC the assessment procedure known as Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) became a major instrument for implementing sustainable territorial development policies in the EU. Public decision is thus called to translate into practice the goal of territorial sustainable development - a guiding principle of public action that requires the composition of different and often contrasting definitions concerning desirable common goods to pursue. However, the way in which this composition may be achieved leaves room for controversies and varied, context-dependent, arrangements. The project combines two different but interwoven explorations. The first is meant to analyse the translation of monistic and pluralistic approaches into “devices of decision” (cost-benefit analysis; integrated and multicriteria approaches). The second axis is devoted to the observation of how these devices have been enacted in controversies concerning large infrastructural projects, specifically: the decision on the location of the new Lisbon airport, the decision of the construction of the Tua dam and the decision on the extension of Milan airport.

The Project provided an interdisciplinary and comparative analysis of the phenomenon of domestic work, including some new empirical research. It mainly concerned the nature of the legal regulation of domestic work and domestic workers, contextualized by socio-legal and socio-economic analysis. Its focus is on law and society, including the impact of changes in the law on society, and encompassed both issues arising from domestic work and issues concerning domestic workers. The Project is focused on Portugal, where there has been no study of the legal implications of the nature of domestic work and the employment relationship, the identity of the workers, or the wider impact of the commodification of such domestic work. It will also consider, in a comparison, the United Kingdom, Brazil, India and Mozambique.

The point of departure of NORMEC was the assessment of the economic importance of the normative dimensions of action and order; its main goal was the setting up of a general framework for the design of institutions and public policies that may foster civic dispositions and collective action. The analysis of the origins and evolution of the concepts of action and order within economics led to the conclusion that the biased mainstream interpretations of the classics’ works deprived their heritage of elements which are crucial in respect to current debates. In particular, Adam Smith’s theory of moral sentiments and the discussion on commensurability by the marginalists, although largely ignored, are highly relevant contributions to the current efforts aimed at recasting economics’ concepts of agency and order. The need for a renewed perspective on economic action in light of the importance of moral concerns, commitments to social norms, structural and institutional factors was confirmed by the experiments and simulations carried out within the project.