with Tommaso Gallozzi, Daniele Bricca, Daniele Groppi and Davide Astiaso Garcia, 2026. The growing adoption of distributed renewable energy systems (DRES) calls for advanced planning methodologies capable of addressing their inherent complexity and multi-dimensional trade-offs. Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) frameworks are widely used to balance diverse objectives, but their effectiveness depends heavily on the selection of criteria, weighting techniques, and integration methods. This paper undertakes a systematic review of the existing literature to analyze how MCDM approaches have been applied in the planning and optimization of DRES projects. The review focuses on the criteria considered in MCDM, the techniques used to assign their relative importance, and the methods employed to integrate these weights into multi-objective evaluations. The analysis draws from a diverse set of peer-reviewed papers, examining economic, technical, environmental, and social dimensions, as well as the relationships between project-specific features and the criteria selection process. Results show that social criteria remain underrepresented both in terms of frequency and of relative importance in the evaluation process, while economic criteria are the most used and influential, underlining the need for more balanced, context-sensitive, and socially inclusive MCDM frameworks. Among MCDM methods and weighting methods, TOPSIS and AHP are by far the most common approaches, respectively. This review provides a foundation for future research aimed at improving the adaptability and effectiveness of MCDM frameworks in DRES.
with Angelica De Fabrizio and Nicole Bernoni, 2025. Achieving universal access to safe water, reliable energy, and food security remains a global challenge, yet policy interventions often target these domains in isolation. While the Water-Energy-Food (WEF) Nexus provides a theoretical framework for resource integration, experimental evidence on behavioral interdependencies remains fragmented. This study conducts a systematic review of 37 experimental and behavioral economics articles evaluating interventions in developing and resource-scarce contexts to analyze methodological approaches and outcomes across the three sectors. Our findings reveal significant heterogeneity: Randomized Controlled Trials dominate the energy and food sectors, focusing primarily on technology adoption and subsidy effectiveness, whereas lab-in-the-field experiments are more prevalent in the water sector, emphasizing common-pool resource governance and collective action. Despite robust evidence that behavioral nudges and financial incentives boost short-term adoption and willingness to pay, the WEF Nexus remains tacit in experimental designs. Most studies treat inter-sectoral linkages as background conditions rather than central variables, missing potentially significant spillover effects between the three domains. We conclude that a transition toward "Nexus-aware" experimental designs is possible, utilizing joint metrics and longitudinal monitoring.
with Ramos-Sosa, M.P., Vergine, S., Attanasi, G., and D’Amico, G. We conducted a questionnaire-based field study to assess the perceived impact of rural electrification through renewable energy in Honduras. We collect data from 68 households from three rural communities in La Muralla National Park (Olancho, Honduras). Each community represents a different electrification context: El Díptamo is already electrified, El Empedrado is partially electrified and close to El Díptamo, and Las Manzanas is the more remote and less electrified community. The objective of the study is twofold: first, to understand the importance of electricity for each community in different social aspects, and second, to study the influence of electricity over time using Markov transition probability matrices. The results show that life in rural communities is highly positively affected by electricity, especially in households with longer access to electricity. More specifically, we find that perceptions of how access to electricity affects life characteristics such as health, education, work, safety, and household life do not differ across communities. Moreover, analysis of the transition probability matrices shows that the strongest differences are found in the transition from past to present. Such differences suggest the presence of spillover effects of energy access between electrified and non-electrified households over time. The matrices are instead similar in terms of probabilities between the present and the future; such similarities across communities in perceptions of future time trends may be driven by a sense of hope that access to electricity will reach all communities in the next years.