A framework for combining social impact assessment and risk assessment

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eiar.2013.05.003Get rights and content

Highlights

  • A hybrid model to combine SIA and SRA namely RSIA is proposed.

  • RSIA can provide the proper mechanism to assess social impacts of natural hazards.

  • RSIA can play the role of ex-post as well as ex-ante assessment.

  • For some complicated and sensitive cases like nuclear energy, conducting a RSIA is necessary.

Abstract

An increasing focus on integrative approaches is one of the current trends in impact assessment. There is potential to combine impact assessment with various other forms of assessment, such as risk assessment, to make impact assessment and the management of social risks more effective. We identify the common features of social impact assessment (SIA) and social risk assessment (SRA), and discuss the merits of a combined approach. A hybrid model combining SIA and SRA to form a new approach called, ‘risk and social impact assessment’ (RSIA) is introduced. RSIA expands the capacity of SIA to evaluate and manage the social impacts of risky projects such as nuclear energy as well as natural hazards and disasters such as droughts and floods. We outline the three stages of RSIA, namely: impact identification, impact assessment, and impact management.

Introduction

Sustainable development requires more than technical changes and economic analyses (Giddings et al., 2002) and social sustainability should not be ignored. Indisputably, in development projects the assessment of social impacts is as important, if not more, than the assessment of the biophysical and economic aspects of these projects (Ahmadvand et al., 2009). Among different kinds of assessment, social impact assessment (SIA) is recognized as a useful and increasingly popular method.

Vanclay (1999) identified three primary reasons for undertaking SIA: (1) SIA is a part of the democratic process that can assist in ensuring equity and transparency of decision-making; (2) SIA is a form of assessment whereby the identification of the likely impact of development is assessed to ensure that future benefits will outweigh the costs of a proposed project; and (3) by using a participatory process, SIA can lead to better decision-making by accessing and incorporating local knowledge. There are also other reasons to use SIA. It assists in giving social aspects equal weight in sustainable development and renders development more socially sound (Barrow, 2000).

A review of the literature reveals a strong belief that SIA needs to be integrated with other methods of assessment to be more effective. For example, it has long been argued that the mainstream of SIA is too isolated from other impact assessment fields, especially regarding the long-term but localized problems such as toxic waste and short-term but broadly-distributed impacts (Fischer, 1999, Freudenburg, 1986). Vanclay (2004) suggested that an increasing focus on integrative approaches was one of the current trends in impact assessment. Without a good exchange of information between the various forms of impact assessment, SIA and other forms will be less effective, and sustainable development will be more difficult to achieve. In fact, SIA runs parallel with, overlaps, or is used by: EIA (Slootweg et al., 2001); risk and hazard assessment (Dreyer et al., 2010); technology assessment (Russell et al., 2010); project programming and policy monitoring and evaluation; triple bottom line assessment (Vanclay, 2004); as well as a number of other subfields within planning and management (Barrow, 2000). However, the potential disadvantages of integration should also be considered. Rattle and Kwiatkowski (2003) reviewed some main challenges of integrating health and social impact assessment. They found the disciplinary challenge to be very serious. “Each discipline and its practitioners became ever more committed to and dependent on its specific ideologies and methodologies. As a result, thought within each disciplinary field was effectively biased by its abstractions and assumptions. Practitioners established vested interests in maintaining their worldviews” (Rattle and Kwiatkowski, 2003 p: 101). Scientific reductionism, disciplinary worldviews and similar institutional barriers can marginalize social factors, and thus SIA can be inhibited by bias towards other fields.

Various papers have provided a conceptual framework to integrate SIA and EIA (e.g. Fischer, 1999, Slootweg et al., 2001) and several attempts have been made to integrate SIA and health impact assessment (HIA) (Kauppinen, 2011, Rattle and Kwiatkowski, 2003). While it is essential to integrate SIA with EIA, HIA and other kinds of IA to ensure better impact assessment and to develop a holistic approach, improving SIA itself by combining it with a similar and synergic assessment like SRA is also desirable for addressing the problems confronting SIA. Despite considerable progress in SIA since the 1970s, the methodology, techniques and approach still need to improve (Barrow, 2000, Kemp, 2011) and some conceptual and procedural difficulties remain (Burdge and Vanclay, 1995, Vanclay, 2004). Problems related to the theoretical foundations of SIA and methodological challenges are some of important issues faced by SIA (Barrow, 2000, Burdge and Vanclay, 1996, Lockie, 2001, Vanclay, 2012).

Although combining SIA and SRA will not solve all theoretical and methodological problems, it can improve the process of SIA. Considering the fact that SIA is a form of risk assessment (Esteves and Vanclay, 2009, Esteves et al., 2012, Vanclay, 1999), combining these approaches could provide an improved framework for understanding and managing the impacts of development. Surprisingly, there has been little serious work regarding the combination of SIA with other types of assessment, particularly SRA.

The aim of this paper is to improve the assessment and management of projects by developing a hybrid model combining social risk assessment and social impact assessment to form ‘Risk and Social Impact Assessment’ (RSIA). The paper is divided into five parts. The first part gives a brief overview of the concept of SIA. The second part addresses risk concepts and SRA. The third part identifies the common features of the two forms of assessment. The fourth part explores the need for combining SIA and SRA, and finally an innovative integrated framework (RSIA) is presented in the fifth part.

Section snippets

Social impact assessment

SIA is now conceived as being the process of analyzing, monitoring and managing the social aspects and consequences of development (Esteves et al., 2012, Vanclay, 2003). SIA can be seen as the result of sociologists' attempts over a long time to make social science more practical (Carley and Walkey, 1981, Carter, 1981, Torgerson, 1981). Carter (1981 p: 5) called SIA “old wine in new bottles” and Freudenburg (1986 p: 452) considered that “its lineage is ancient, but its emergence is recent”. SIA

Social risk assessment

While the concept of risk assessment has been a well-established part of the natural sciences since the 1970s, using the concept in the social sciences is rather new (Goldman and Baum, 2000, Krimsky and Golding, 1992). Technological progress in the 1980s had a strong impact on the establishment and expansion of interdisciplinary risk research and the social science contribution to it (Zinn, 2008). The prevailing definition of risk in the social sciences is uncertainty about and severity of the

Common features of SIA and SRA, social impacts and social risks

Burdge and Vanclay (1995, p. 32) consider that social impacts are “all social and cultural consequences to human populations of any public or private actions that alter the ways in which people live, work, play, relate to one another, organize to meet their needs, and generally cope as members of society”, including “changes to the norms, values, and beliefs of individuals that guide and rationalize their cognition of themselves and their society.” Slootweg et al. (2001, p. 25) consider that

The need to combine SIA and SRA into RSIA

We categorized social impacts in SIA and social risks in SRA according to the way they are commonly considered in order to develop a combined typology of SIA and SRA (see Table 2). This typology will be used to explain the desirability of combining these methods into a integrated approach we call ‘Risk and Social Impact Assessment’ (RSIA).

Demonstrating the value of combining SIA and SRA

There is no evidence in the literature of cases where both SIA and SRA have been carried out together. However, the two examples presented below reveal the potential value of RSIA.

Case 1

SIA and the Biosafety Protocol (based on Stabinsky, 2000).

The central element of the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety (an international agreement on biosafety) is a procedure called ‘advance informed agreement’ (AIA). Under the AIA procedure, importing countries must explicitly agree to the importation of living

RSIA: A proposed framework to combine SIA and SRA

Table 2 demonstrated that there was a case for combining SIA and SRA. Fig. 3 provided a schema demonstrating how RSIA provides something more than SIA or SRA on their own. In Fig. 4, we provide an outline of what RSIA could look like. The various models of the SIA process (e.g. Barrow, 2000, Burdge, 1994, Esteves and Vanclay, 2009, Finsterbusch et al., 1983, Goldman, 2000, ICPGSIA (Interorganizational Committee on Principles, Guidelines for Social Impact Assessment), 2003, Slootweg et al., 2001

Conclusion: Considering the merits of Integration

The relation between risk assessment, risk management and social impact assessment is the central issue of this paper. All types of assessment face the common need for integration and the complexities it presents (Burdge and Vanclay, 1995, Vanclay, 2004). There has long been a demand for SIA to be better integrated into other means of assessment. Rather than remain as the poor cousin of EIA (Lockie, 2001) or the orphan of the assessment family (Burdge, 2002), SIA arguably needs to combine with

Acknowledgements

H. M. thanks the Ministry of Science, Research, and Technology of Iran (MSRT) for a PhD fellowship.

Hossein Mahmoudi is PhD student in Department of Social Sciences in Agriculture at University of Hohenheim, Germany. His interests and experience have been concentrated on social impact assessment and social risk assessment.

References (74)

  • F. Vanclay

    Conceptualising social impacts

    Environ Impact Assess Rev

    (2002)
  • F. Vanclay

    Principles for social impact assessment: a critical comparison between the international and US documents

    Environ Impact Assess Rev

    (2006)
  • F. Vanclay

    The potential application of social impact assessment in integrated coastal zone management

    Ocean Coast Manag

    (2012)
  • D. Venables et al.

    Living with nuclear power: sense of place, proximity, and risk perceptions in local host communities

    J Environ Psychol

    (2012)
  • S.L. Albrecht et al.

    The place of attitudes and perceptions in social impact assessment

    Soc Nat Resour

    (1988)
  • T. Aven et al.

    On risk defined as an event where the outcome is uncertain

    J Risk Res

    (2009)
  • T. Aven et al.

    Risk management and governance, concepts, guidelines and applications

    (2010)
  • G. Bammer et al.

    Uncertainty and risk, multidisciplinary perspectives

    (2008)
  • C.J. Barrow

    Social impact assessment: an introduction

    (2000)
  • H.A. Becker

    Social impact assessment: method and experience in Europe, North America and the developing world

    (1997)
  • R. Burdge

    A conceptual approach to social impact assessment

    (1994)
  • R. Burdge

    Why is social impact assessment the orphan of the assessment process?

    Impact Assess Proj Apprais

    (2002)
  • R. Burdge et al.

    Social impact assessment

  • R. Burdge et al.

    Social impact assessment: a contribution to the state of the art series

    Impact Assess

    (1996)
  • M. Carley et al.

    Exploring some key elements in SIA

  • N. Carter

    SIA: New wine in old bottles

  • A. Cottrell et al.

    Social assessment as a complementary tool to hazard risk assessment and disaster planning

    Australas J Disaster Trauma Stud

    (2010)
  • A. Cottrell et al.

    Disasters and climate change

  • A. Dani et al.

    The World Bank's poverty and social impact analysis

  • D. Denney

    Risk and society

    (2005)
  • A. Ely et al.

    The process of assessment

  • A. Ely et al.

    Overview of the general framework

  • A.M. Esteves et al.

    Social impact assessment: the state of the art

    Impact Assess Proj Apprais

    (2012)
  • K. Finsterbusch

    The potential role of social impact assessment in instituting public policies

  • K. Finsterbusch et al.

    Social impact assessment methods

    (1983)
  • W.R. Freudenburg

    Social impact assessment

    Annu Rev Sociol

    (1986)
  • C.C. Geisler

    Rethinking SIA: why ex ante research isn't enough

    Soc Nat Resour

    (1993)
  • Cited by (0)

    Hossein Mahmoudi is PhD student in Department of Social Sciences in Agriculture at University of Hohenheim, Germany. His interests and experience have been concentrated on social impact assessment and social risk assessment.

    Ortwin Renn is professor and Chair of Environmental Sociology and Technology Assessment at the University of Stuttgart (Germany). He directs the Stuttgart Research Center for Interdisciplinary Risk and Innovation Studies at the University of Stuttgart (ZIRIUS) and the non-profit company DIALOGIK, a research institute for the investigation of communication and participation processes in environmental policy making. He is primarily interested in risk governance, political participation and technology assessment.

    Frank Vanclay is professor and Head of the Department of Cultural Geography, Faculty of Spatial Sciences, University of Groningen, The Netherlands. His expertise covers the topics of social impact assessment (SIA), place, and social aspects of natural resource management. He is editor of several books on SIA, he is the author of the International Principles for SIA published in 2003.

    Volker Hoffmann is professor and former Head of Department of Social Sciences in Agriculture at University of Hohenheim, Germany.

    Ezatollah Karami is professor of agricultural development and extension at Shiraz University, Iran. He is a specialist in social research in agriculture and water scarcity.

    View full text