Local and
non-specialist participation in impact assessment
Richard Howitt
Macquarie
University NSW 2109 Australia
e-mail
richard.howitt@mq.edu.au
Abstract: Major development
projects are often conceptualised and justified at scales beyond the local. Yet
their impacts are often most directly experienced, and most controversial and
contested, at more local scales. This paradox presents both development
projects’ advocates and managers and the populations and groups they affect
with a range of difficulties in identifying, understanding and managing direct
and indirect costs and benefits of the development process. This chapter
considers the issue of participation in project assessment by affected
populations and relevant non-specialists. It suggests that impact assessment
studies must consider the appropriate scales for participation, and then
reviews conceptual, methodological and practical issues in fostering, managing
and understanding non-specialists’ participation. The chapter’s basic argument
is that dealing with social, environmental, economic and other impact
assessment exercises as a set of technical tasks misunderstands the nature of
the data that is relevant to the exercise and the interpretative and practical
responses required to produce desirable, ethical and justifiable outcomes.
Specifically, the chapter argues that non-specialist participation is
fundamental to managing impacts (negative and positive) and achieving
sustainable, beneficial outcomes at all scales from development projects.
Keywords: impact
assessment; geographical scale; participation; methodology; social justice; social impact
assessment.
When proposing major development projects such
as roads, mines, dams, railways, settlements and so on, governments, commercial
interests and international agencies typically identify goals that reflect
national policy objectives or broadly-defined ‘public’ aspirations. National
governments typically conceptualise development projects in terms of national,
even nation-building, goals. Taxation revenue, aggregate employment and trade
outcomes, assertion of territorial and resource rights, and broader notions of
development and industrialisation are common motivations for development
projects. Beneficial outcomes are typically aggregated and expressed in terms
of unequivocally good outcomes such as national revenues, exports, wages and
employment or productivity. International development agencies often seek to
benchmark proposed projects against even wider criteria of international best
practice and global objectives. Commercial interests typically highlight
transnational investment strategies prioritise global profitability, corporate
standing and market imperatives.
In these formulations, local concerns are easily
relegated to a marginal concern in decision-making. Indeed, the planning
literature has coined a term for localized opposition to contested developments
the NIMBY (‘not in my backyard’) Syndrome[1].
This approach caricatures localized concerns as parochial, anti-development,
self-serving, even backward and traitorous. When such concerns interact with
patterns of settlement (rural/urban), religious, ethnic or cultural
differences, or political or ideological polarization, the risk is that vested
interests at one scale are reconstituted as representative interests, while
legitimate concerns of local populations are dismissed as naïve, ill-informed
and sectional.[2]
Yet, despite being generally framed to achieve
global or national policy objectives or strategic goals, development projects
always have some form of local execution and impact. This presents a dilemma
for impact assessment of development projects. Those charged with evaluating,
managing, monitoring and mitigating the negative impacts of development
projects must advise on how to deliver the outcomes that motivated the project
in the first place without imposing unethical, unreasonable, unsustainable or
avoidable burdens on locally affected communities and the environments that
support them. Where impact assessment is treated as a technical task, or where
it is performed as part of the project advocacy process, it is all too easy for
the task of managing impacts to be re-invented as managing (or controlling)
local interference in the national development process with potentially
divisive, long-term and even violent outcomes. Such approaches risk reducing
the impact assessment report to some sort of post facto technical
justification of development decisions that have already been made and accepted
in policy frameworks of development advocates. In this sense, the impact
statement becomes a tool in selling or justifying development proposals to
populations that either don’t understand, don’t accept or don’t agree with
their rationale or implications.
Another way of framing the challenge for impact
assessment is to invert the scale orientation from serving those at the top of
decision-making hierarchies towards providing a way for the local scale
concerns, understandings and consequences to be understood by key
decision-makers and to ensure they are properly considered and reflected in
decisions. Where development goals, processes and projects are subjected to a
negotiated process rather than arbitrarily imposed process, and impact
assessment, public education and consultative or negotiated procedures are
integrated with wider scale decision-making, even complex development dilemmas
can be addressed with considerable support from diverse populations.[3]
While their methods and epistemological
frameworks may differ, environmental and social impact studies are both
concerned with the task of understanding responses to environmental change. In
many jurisdictions, the term ‘environment’ is itself defined in terms of both
biophysical and social concerns. The complexity of interacting ecological and
social domains, however, risks entrenching the notion that impact assessment is
a highly specialised field requiring sophisticated technical expertise as the
basis for involvement. Notions of integration, consultation and public display
and review of information are commonplace in the impact assessment literature,
but often limited to a post facto comments phase, or involvement in
specific social elements of the assessment.[4]
While such concepts are generally seen to provide a basis for public,
non-specialist participation in impact studies, two relatively new concepts
offer a way of seeing a broader context for non-specialist involvement in
impact assessment.
The Great Whale Public Environmental Review
process in Québec in the early-1990s developed two innovative ideas in the
terms of reference for the project’s impact assessment. First, the study was
required to use a ‘multicultural definition of the environment’. Second it was
required to identify and emphasize ‘culturally valued ecosystem components’.[5]
These two concepts provide a valuable framework from which to understand the
roles local and non-specialist participants can play in impact assessment.
The first concept ensures that the ‘environment’
is defined not in terms of a particular disciplinary expertise, or in terms of political
convenience, but in terms of the character of the affected territory. This
produces a description of the affected environment ‘in a way that each affected
group could recognize’ and which also allows ‘particular emphasis to be
accorded to the interactions between ecosystems and human communities.’[6]
In other words, the definition of environments affected by a project is not a
technical task, but a task that requires interaction with the existing
users of the territory. The environment is to be understood as a web of
relationships to be studied from multiple vantage points of meaning, perception
and utility that are integral to the definition of the affected environment.
This leads directly to the second concept, which
considers how existing populations (both local groups, and more remote groups
that retain an interest in the environmental and other resources of a
territory, e.g. governments, national populations and others) value particular
elements of the environment affected by a development proposal. The Great Whale
guidelines required the impact study to ‘identify and group the environmental
components valued by each community, within a classification system which takes
each culture into account.’[7]
Again, the insights of the non-specialist are required for the impact
study to achieve what is needed.
In putting a multicultural definition and
understanding of how environmental components are valued into practice as a
basis for identifying, predicting, managing and responding to likely
environmental and social impacts of a project, it is necessary for impact
assessment teams to acquire information, understanding and insight from those
groups that constitute the affected populations. Local values; anecdotal,
observational experience; colloquial terminology; the all-but-invisible
background of relationships, behaviours and kinship structures that shape
people-environment relations on-the-ground are all relevant ‘data’ for impact
assessment that seeks to produce insights hat are more useful in managing and
responding to impacts than a pro-forma report that presents ‘scientific’ data
and statistical predictions.
Thus, the local non-specialist should be
understood as a source of otherwise inaccessible data, and as an
essential co-interpreter of the implications of proposed changes. It is not
sufficient for impact assessment technicians to simply demand that such people
give away their information as data for technical analysis. In fact, the social
and cultural context of their information is important even essential in
the impact assessment task. Developing ways of working with relevant local
interests and non-specialists as co-equal partners rather than inferior or
parochial participants is also essential. Indeed, Berger’s early notion of
‘non-technical experts’ captures some of this idea.[8]
It does, however, lead us to consideration of the methodological implications
of recognizing these non-technical expert inputs into impact assessment.
The impact assessment process is typically organized
methodologically into five or six phases from scoping to evaluation.[9]
If one takes seriously the challenges of local, non-specialist or general
public participation, then there are methodological issues to be considered at
each step.
In the scoping phase, for example,
opportunities must provided for meaningful input from public sources in setting
the historical, social, geographical and ecological scope of impact studies.
This can be achieved through formal hearings, public submissions or targeted consultation
processes. Whatever mechanism is adopted, where cultural or language issues
need to be addressed, they must be considered from the earliest stages. This
may require multilingual publications, use of interpreters in public meetings,
and employment of cross-cultural expertise in developing processes that are
fair, accessible and inclusive. In settings where historical circumstances
produce inter-cultural mistrust, misunderstanding or misinformation, it may be
necessary to allow sufficient time for trust-building exercises to be
undertaken. It is also necessary, however, to recognize that good process is
also about good product, and that delaying the delivery of outcomes while
‘trust building’ is proceeding, only to find that changes in external circumstances
(e.g. markets, elections, technology) prevent the development project moving to
formal consideration will further undermine trust.
In the profiling phase it will be
necessary to ensure that the impact assessment team itself is made aware of the
place of local and non-specialist input to the process, including ensuring that
the multiple dimensions of a multicultural definition of the environment are
reflected in the profiling achieved through descriptive statistics and site
inspections. This may best be achieved by incorporating cross-cultural brokers
in cultural awareness training of the impact assessment team, or by including
appropriate non-specialists in project teams or local steering committees or
other project structures.
When formulating alternatives, it is easy
to shift back to more conventionally exclusive methods, assuming that this is a
more technical task. Yet in moving beyond a limited scope of alternatives from
‘no development’ through to ‘proposed project’, it is appropriate to include
consultation about what local groups are trying to achieve in their own lives;
how do they see their own preferred development trajectories?
In the assessment (or prediction)
phase, when the impact assessment team seeks to make sense of likely changes in
the web of social and environmental relationships arising from the proposed
intervention, non-specialist participation is crucial. Yet is often the case
that it is precisely here that specialists see their own expertise as most
important and in which ‘participation’ is limited in order to reduce
interference in the technical work of impact assessment. Howitt and Jackson,
for example, report that there was a government expectation in the social
impact assessment of the Alice Springs to Darwin railway project, that
consideration would be limited to ‘a technical review of tangible physical
impacts that were amenable to management through investment in physical works’.[10]
Their study did not limit itself to that requirement, but the government’s
expectation reflects a willingness to avoid dealing with less tangible concerns
that arise in development projects, such as perceptions of risk,
culturally-specific relations with landscapes, and the historical restrictions
of access to opportunities for affected cultural groups. In their case study,
Howitt and Jackson identify a range of safety, public health, regional
economic, compensation and human rights concerns that would not have been
raised in a study that accepted the ‘limited technical review’ scope preferred by
the government interests involved.[11]
To ignore these more complex, intangible and awkward issues at the planning
phase can burden development projects, and their government sponsors or
commercial advocates, with a long legacy of social dissent, public liabilities
and unintended consequences that detract from a project’s capacity to deliver
its proposed benefits.
In the monitoring/mitigation and evaluation
phases, there is also an imperative for maintaining good inter-cultural
participatory and consultative mechanisms. Where adoption of a multicultural
definition of environment and recognition of a range of differently-valued
environmental elements has permitted the identification of a range of
culturally-specific impacts and concerns, it will be completely inappropriate
to revert to monitoring and evaluative techniques that exclude cultural
perspectives other than those of the dominant culture (including the dominant
technical culture). To ensure that such effects are monitored and responded to,
and encompassed within post-development evaluation, it is necessary to include
non-specialists in monitoring and evaluation teams, and to resource them to
engage with the lived experience of post-development impacts as they occur
‘on-the-ground’.
At each step
of the impact assessment process, then, it is necessary to develop methods that
maximize opportunities for popular participation, which encompass local and
non-specialist knowledge, insight, experience and concern, and which increase
the local sensitivity and inter-cultural awareness of the technical
practitioners in an assessment team.
This produces a range of practical concerns in
managing impact studies, particularly in inter-cultural settings.
First, it is necessary to ensure that technical
specifications and terms of reference are framed to accommodate the specific
characteristics of the (biophysical and social) environment being
examined. Adoption of appropriate definitions and terms of reference, such as
those referred to from the Great Whale project, must be accompanied by
direction of support and resources to enable non-specialist participation in
the process. This will often involve budgeting for interpreters, translation
costs, transport for participants, support for affected groups to meet with
themselves to formulate their concerns and proposals, and even commissioning
appropriate experts to facilitate and monitor non-specialist participation in
process.[12]
Second, this approach requires development
agencies and project proponents themselves to better understand the importance
of inter-cultural participation in shaping better development projects.[13]
It is a characteristic of technical expertise that we often regret that
non-specialists can’t see the world as we see it. Non-specialists cannot design
a dam, or plan a mine, or draw up specifications for a processing plant, and
many experts think that this excludes them from participation in technically
complex activities. Yet it is one of the enduring realities of the contemporary
world that one does need to be an economist to participate in economic
decisions. In the early-1990s I witnessed a project planning exercise in which
engineers had a preferred development site and a preferred design approach. For
a range of contingent reasons, neither the preferred site nor the preferred
project configuration was achievable. In reviewing social impacts of this
project, the non-specialist participants in the affected community helped to
identify a more appropriate site that was equally technically acceptable, and
they suggested an innovative design proposition that actually lowered
environmental impacts and costs! Although the project did not proceed
for external reasons, the lesson was that the non-specialists’ approach from
‘outside the square’ was an effective partnership that changed the project in
ways that made it better for both the affected community and the developer.
Third, it requires an opening up of the impact
assessment system to a longer-term commitment to monitoring and
post-development evaluation in order to allow those affected groups who have
participated in predicting possible impacts to also learn and adapt to the
realities of environmental and social effects as they develop. Again, this may
have resource and budgeting implications, but it will also involve a
significant mind shift for many technical and privileged participants in impact
assessment and project development systems.
This brief discussion has sought to consider
conceptual, methodological and practical issues related to local and
non-specialist participation in impact assessment. It has suggested that part
of the problem in conceptualising participatory approaches in the past has, not
surprisingly, revolved around issues of power. Perhaps surprisingly, it has also
identified issues of geographical scale as a significant issue. In particular,
it has suggested that the formulation of project objectives at one scale,
typically the scale of a national economy or sub-national provincial policy
goals, contributes to a mindset in which the assessment task is defined as
technically complex and accessible only to technical experts. Where this is
matched with a tension between social groups constituted at more local scales
(particularly different cultural groups), the foundations for imposed
development and exclusive impact assessment methods are set. These tensions
might be between ethnically distinct cultural groups (e.g. settler states and
indigenous minority populations) or it might be between regionally
differentiated class, religious, political or other groups. Where powerful
government and technical bureaucracies are matched with the economic and
commercial interests of developers, the risk is that non-participatory methods
that are seen as technically acceptable are adopted and crucial data about the
impact processes generated by a proposal become inaccessible to the impact
study. While interests privileged by existing patterns of power and opportunity
might see little wrong with further entrenching a ‘natural order’ of disadvantage,
poverty and victimhood, subsequent generations may live to regret the
harvesting of the consequences when dissent, disaffection and dysfunction
impose unbearable costs on social, economic and environmental systems.
This produces a dilemma for impact assessment
professionals. While we must advocate the need for properly accredited
technical expertise and professional benchmarking, we must also, as a matter of
professional integrity open our processes up to more inclusive participatory
approaches, and be willing to advocate proper support for such approaches from
development agencies, governments and project developers.
For locally affected groups, the key element in
this dilemma is their own participation in the impact assessment process. In
the particular case of cross-cultural participation, where the affected
populations differ from the dominant culture, this chapter has suggested
principles to guide nurturing of increased participation. These principles are
consistent with the ethical imperatives underpinning development action and
project assessment sustainability, social justice, economic equity and the
protection of diversity.[14]
For government agencies and project advocates,
the dilemma is often reflected in terms of balancing long term and short term
imperatives and opportunities. In settings where there is little political or
commercial benefit in protecting minority rights (including not only indigenous
or ethnic minority rights, but also the rights of marginalized rural
communities in urbanized societies, or non-conformist religious minorities
even in ostensibly secular societies such as Australia, Canada and the USA or
other groups defined as different in class, gender, age or other terms, the
risk is that such challenges are always placed in the “too hard basket”, and
that resources are not made available until the opportunities to achieve better
outcomes have passed. Such an approach is myopic and typifies the
decision-making of even mature democracies. It imposes a considerable burden of
ecological and social processes that should be avoided by good impact
assessment.
Richie Howitt
is Associate Professor in the Department of Human Geography, Macquarie
University. He has been involved in social impact assessment as a practitioner,
commentator and teacher since the late-1980s. He led the recent social impact
assessment of the Alice Springs to Darwin railway in Australia, and has
contributed to impact studies in Kakadu, Cape York and elsewhere. His most recent
book is Rethinking Resource Management (Routledge, 2001), which includes a
chapter on SIA methods and issues. He won the Australian Award for University
Teaching (Social Science) in 1999, and has recently worked on issues of native
title, geographical scale and corporate culture.
[1] See e.g. Buchan, D. 1992. "Not In My Backyard Syndrome: labelling to avoid
the issue?" Social Impact 2:6-7; and Smith, L. Graham, Carla Y.
Nell and Mark V. Prystupa. 1997. "The converging dynamics of interest representation
in resources management." Environmental Management 21:139-146.
[2] For a discussion of
this mechanism in the deligitimation Aboriginal protests about the negative
impacts of mining on their interests see e.g. Howitt,
R. 1991. "Aborigines and restructuring in the mining sector: vested and
representative interests." Australian Geographer 22:117-119.
[3] For an example of this
see e.g. Johnson, P.T. 1993. "How I turned a critical
public into useful consultants." Harvard Business Review
1993:56-66. In this paper, the CEO of the Bonneville Power Administration
reflects on the incorporation of public and in-house consultative processes
into decision-making about complex power management and financial planning. For
a powerful examination of the integration of negotiation and impact assessment
procedures, see e.g. O'Faircheallaigh, C. 1996. Making Social Impact
Assessment count: a negotiation-based approach for indigenous peoples.
Brisbane: Centre for Australian Public Sector Management, Griffith University.
[4] See inter alia: Beckwith, J.A. and G. Syme. 1993. "Muddling through to an
Australian water quality strategy." Impact Assessment 11:349-365;
Henry, C. 1992. "What's so important about public involvement?" Social
Impact 1:3; Lane, M.B., H. Ross and A.P. Dale. 1997. "Social Impact
Research: integrating the social, political and planning paradigms." Human
Organization 56:302-310;Vincent, S. 1994. Consulting the population:
definition and methodological questions. Montréal: Great Whale Public
Review Support Office; World Bank, Environment Department. 1994. Resettlement
and Development: the Bankwide review of projects involving involuntary
resettlement, 1986-1993. Washington: World Bank;
[5] Evaluating Committee, Kativik Environmental Quality Commission, Federal
Review Committee North of the 55th Parallel and Federal Environmental
Assessment Review Panel. 1992. Guidelines: Environmental Impact Statement
for the proposed Great Whale River Hydroelectric project. Montréal: Great
Whale Public Review Support Office, chapter 3 (paragraphs 302-306).
[6] ibid. (paragraph
302).
[7] ibid. (paragraph 306).
The guidelines specifically refer to the need to identify and address the
environmental components valued by the Western scientific community and those
valued by each of the Cree, Inuit, Naskapis and non-aboriginal populations of
the region and the province.
[8] Funk, R. (1985). The Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry in Retrospect. Social
Impact Analysis and Development Planning in the Third World. W. Derman and S.
Whiteford. Boulder, Westview Press: 119-132 provides an overview of the
scope, methods and consequences of the Berger Inquiry. (Berger, T. R. (1977). Northern
Frontier Northern Homeland: the report of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry
(2 volumes). Toronto, James Lorimer & Co., re-published in 1988) Also see O'Malley, M. (1976). The past and future land: an account of the
Berger Inquiry into the Mackenzie Valley pipeline. Toronto, Peter Martin
Associates.
[9] Howitt, R (2001). Rethinking
Resource Management: justice, sustainability and indigenous peoples,
London, Routledge: 335, identifies scoping, profiling, formulating
alternatives, predicting effects, monitoring and mitigating, and finally
evaluation as distinct steps. Barrow, C. J. (2000). Social
Impact Assessment: an introduction. London, Arnold:37 suggests eight
steps: scoping, formulation of alternatives, profiling, projection, assessment,
evaluation, mitigation (if needed), and ongoing monitoring. Goldman and Baum
(Introduction in Goldman, L. R.
(2000). Social Impact Analysis: an Applied Anthropology manual. Oxford,
Berg: 1-31) suggest five phases screening, scooping, assessment, reporting,
reviewing, followed by post impact assessment decision-making, monitoring and
management.
[10] Howitt, R. and S. Jackson (2000). Social Impact Assessment and Linear
Projects. Social Impact Analysis: an Applied Anthropology manual. L. R.
Goldman. Oxford, Berg: 257-294, at p272.
[11] ibid. at pages
276-281.
[12] Agius et. al. refer
to the importance of independent monitoring and employment of a ‘process
specialist’ in fostering high levels of indigenous participation in a complex
native title negotiation that drew heavily on social impact assessment
approaches developed by O’Faircheallaigh (op. cit.) and others including
Howitt (1993 op. cit.) and Howitt and Jackson (2000 op. cit.).
See Agius, P., J. Davies, R.
Howitt and L. Johns. (2001). Negotiating Comprehensive Settlement of Native
Title Issues: building a new scale of justice in South Australia. Native Title
Representative Bodies Conference, Townsville, Qld, August 2001.
[13] See e.g. Brody, H.
(2000). The Other Side of Eden: hunters, farmers and the shaping of the
world, Vancouver, Douglas and McIntyre. Brody offers a powerful review of
the foundations for misunderstanding meaning between hunter-gather societies
and settler agricultural societies in the modern world.
[14] These four ethical
principles are used to develop a coherent framework for rethinking resource
management, including the place of impact assessment, in Howitt (2001) op.
cit. note 9, above.