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Pursuing the goal of large-scale ecosystem protection, the State of New York has for decades been acquiring private land parcels in the Adirondack State Park. While effective in terms of environmental protection, the process has repeatedly caused tensions with local communities who found themselves deprived of development possibilities. To ease these tensions, the involved parties agreed that a more open and participatory process was needed for guiding the Park’s future development and conservation strategies. To push further the improvements implemented in 1998 with the State Open Space Conservation Plan, this paper suggests a framework for ranking alternative projects by use of multiple criteria decision aid (MCDA). With reference to data from parcels acquired by the State in the past, it is shown how MCDA is able to take into account a number of (in part conflicting) goals in a coherent and transparent way. For the case study, the NAIADE method was chosen, which can handle a number of different types of data and which supports the analysis of the structure of power interests and stakeholders by means of an institutional analysis.