The availability of underexploited agricultural residues in Thailand opens up the opportunity to supply second-generation bioethanol production. The national implementation of residues-to-biofuel can potentially initiate the bioeconomy and greenhouse gas mitigation, requiring engagement from the multi-stakeholders to develop effective policy recommendations. Thus, the study aims to optimize the implementation of the national strategy from a multi-criteria approach to evaluate the concerned aspects and important indicators for second-generation bioethanol development through a participatory prioritization by the actual stakeholders

Methods:

To analyze the relevance of the different dimensions regarding important levels of criteria, a Delphi-AHP technique was applied. The evaluation process was conducted with different stakeholders and elaborated by using a pairwise comparison of 4 dimensions (main-criteria) and 12 indicators (sub-criteria). The evaluation was applied to the participants to share their preferences evaluating the most important factors from the aspect of technical feasibility, environmental impacts, economic feasibility and social impacts.

Results:

Bioethanol stakeholders in Thailand from 5 different branches (industry/ business sectors, NPO/NGO, governmental sectors, academic/research institute and financial institution/bank) participated in the Delphi survey. The 20 expert’s evaluation of four dimensions reveals the highest score from the economic feasibility (32.3%), followed by environmental impacts (25.6%), technical feasibility (24.0%) and social impacts (18.1%). From the sub-criteria assessment, the participants selected ‘final price per liter’, ‘added value of input materials’ and ‘net energy balance’ for the top three important indicators among 12 sub-criteria. From the identification of connection between preferable criteria and participants’ expertise, the results encouraged the process of employing different associated backgrounds into account at the step of policy planning in addition to the consideration of affiliations.

Conclusions:

The stakeholder’s participatory evaluation indicated the importance of economic aspects, highlighting the necessity of the governmental driven policy that needs to be considered. However, implementation scenarios have to be embedded in a broader range of aspects because all the dimension were rated with high impacts. For the future sustainable bioenergy, involvement from stakeholders’ opinions can imply multifaceted scenarios that may interconnect to the social acceptance and benefits for all relevant players when considering the development of advanced bioenergy as a policy recommendation.