Recently, it is expected that small hydropower (SHP) could potentially provide sufficient amounts of alternative energy in Korea where there is an abundance of potential sites and where social efforts are being made to reduce the emissions of green house gases. In the past, the resources survey for SHP development has been carried out using onsite surveys and paper maps, which incurred a great deal of time and cost. Furthermore, the tools for decision making such as determining development priorities or evaluating feasibility have been considered only economic aspect and focused on the performance characteristics of power generation. However, as the concept of sustainable development has been being advanced in recent years, especially focused on human-social, environmental and ecological in addition to economical sector; the consideration of these multiple criteria has become essential for sustainable SHP development. This study aims to propose the spatial multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) methodology for determining priorities among a number of locations on the planning stage of SHP development using AHP and GIS. The proposed methodology is applied for determining development priorities among the SHP locations in Cho River basin and this study presents the detailed spatial information data and the results of development priorities. As a fundamental work, this study will be beneficial to the future activation of SHP development and will help the decision making in evaluating the feasibility of SHP development.