SIA Primer资料文件与下载

The following overview of Social Impact Assessment is included to help you understand the historical development, general practice, and political nature of SIAs before watching the lectures.

Overview of Social Impact Assessment 

The practice of Social Impact Assessment developed over the past four or five decades in conjunction with the emergence of EIA requirements in a number of countries. It was clear from the outset that social impacts (or the consequences of development on residents and the life of a community) had to be included in any comprehensive analysis of environmental impacts.

SIA has been defined in terms of efforts to assess or estimate ahead of time the social consequences likely to be caused by specific policy actions, government efforts, or development.  It provides a framework for prioritizing, gathering, analyzing, and incorporating social information and participation into the design and delivery of development interventions.  SIA is meant to ensure that development takes account of relevant social issues and incorporates participation strategies for involving a wide range of stakeholders. 

In the earliest years, SIA focused on the jobs likely to be created or lost as a result of a proposed development and the impact of a proposed development on land (and housing) prices.  Developers wanted to provide this information to balance the sense that their proposed projects would only have “negative” environmental impacts.

Over time, SIA specialists began to develop modeling tools that allowed them to analyze a more complete range of social impacts. These began with Stakeholder Assessment, differentiating the range of impacts likely to be caused by a proposed project and how these would affect different sub-groups of the population (by income, class, race, etc.).

Social impacts now focus on the “human dimensions of environment” including socio-cultural, institutional, historical, and political outcomes of development or investment decisions and sectoral policies.   They examine the way that proposed development projects or policies might affect social inclusion and cohesion, empower the poor and vulnerable, and create social risk of various kinds.

In some handbooks, social impacts are characterized as lifestyle impacts (i.e. the way people behave and relate to family, friends, and cohorts), cultural impacts (i.e. on shared customs, obligations, values, language, religious beliefs, and other elements that make a social or ethnic group distinct), community impacts (on infrastructure, service, voluntary organizations, activity networks, and cohesion), quality of life impacts (i.e. sense of place, aesthetics and heritage, perception of belonging, security, and livability), and health impacts (i.e. mental, physical, and social well-being).

The forecasting tools used to prepare SIAs are not well specified.  Assessors tend to invent forecasting methods that reflect the specific concerns raised during the EIA scoping process or of special concern to public officials or community advocacy groups. The techniques for producing credible SIAs almost all rely on extensive public or stakeholder input.  There are many formats for gathering, discussing, and applying the ideas and concerns that emerge from these various forms of public engagement.

In some parts of the world, SIAs are now commissioned routinely (independently of EIAs), especially when controversies arise over the likely displacement caused by proposed development activities.  Instead of focusing only on negative impacts, SIAs are also being used to create opportunities for dialogue among social groups, civil society, grassroots organizations, and different levels of government to determine what benefits might accrue from different versions of proposed projects. This has led some observers to question what they see as the “political” nature of social impact assessment. When questions come up about the “effectiveness” of SIA, the answer depends on whether SIA is being used only as a data collection tool (to meet a regulatory requirement) or whether it is intended to encourage developers to look for ways of minimizing adverse impacts – or ensure positive results (especially on groups like aboriginals who have often been excluded from SIA processes). If the effectiveness of SIA is measured by the actual impacts caused by the projects being assessed, then SIA efforts that do not include a provision for ongoing monitoring of impact are unlikely to be effective in ensuring favorable outcomes. The claim that SIAs are “political,” rather than scientific, are not a function of how impacts are assessed but more about the non-objective judgments that are made about who participates, how the findings are interpreted, and what is done to ensure beneficial outcomes are encouraged.

The time frame for forecasting social impacts tends to be substantially shorter than the time frame used to forecast environmental impacts. New tools, like social network analysis, are being created all the time to make it easier to specify various social impacts likely to be caused by different kind of development. The experts who do social impact assessment tend to come from the applied social science fields rather than from environmental engineering.

Mitigation of the social impacts likely to be caused by new projects or redevelopment efforts requires close monitoring and designation of responsibility (as part of an SIA) for ongoing efforts to avoid, reduce, or remediate the social impacts caused by new development.