Francois Retief

Strengthening impact assessment: a call for integration and focus

We suggest that the impact assessment community has lost its way based on our observation that impact assessment is under attack because of a perceived lack of efficiency. Specifically, we contend that the proliferation of different impact assessment types creates separate silos of expertise and feeds arguments for not only a lack of efficiency but also a lack of effectiveness of the process through excessive specialisation and a lack of interdisciplinary practice. We propose that the solution is a return to the basics of impact assessment with a call for increased integration around the goal of sustainable development and focus through better scoping. We rehearse and rebut counter arguments covering silo-based expertise, advocacy, democracy, sustainability understanding and communication. We call on the impact assessment community to rise to the challenge of increasing integration and focus, and to engage in the debate about the means of strengthening impact assessment.

The Evolution Of Environmental Assessment Debates: Critical Perspectives From South Africa

This paper explores the evolution of environmental assessment (EA) debates over the last decade within the South African context as reflected in the proceedings of the annual International Association for Impact Assessment, South African chapter (IAIAsa) conferences between 1997 and 2008. Retrospective analysis is important to ensure that the profession avoids unlearning key lessons, keeps and gains perspective, builds the knowledge base and plans for the future. The analysis involved a review of 472 papers presented at these conferences. The results suggest that debates have shifted away from concerns with quality and application of environmental assessment towards serious questions about effectiveness and the value that environmental assessment is adding. It is clear that the profession is currently going through a period of intense introspection, questioning the need for and contribution of EA.

A QUALITY AND EFFECTIVENESS REVIEW PROTOCOL FOR STRATEGIC ENVIRONMENTAL ASSESSMENT (SEA) IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

The need for empirical research and systematic performance evaluation of SEA, to advance theoretical understandings as well as practice, has been widely expressed. To promote such research any performance evaluation has to ensure that it is conceptually justified, methodologically sound, practically viable and tailored to the local context. This paper describes a SEA quality and effectiveness review protocol for application within the South African context. Based on international perspectives and debates it provides a description of the conceptual thinking underpinning the structure of the protocol in terms of its approach and framework as well as methodological justification on how the review areas and indicators were designed. Finally a critical evaluation of its application to selected case studies is presented. It concludes that the conceptual framework and methodology could be applied in any context although the contents in terms of review areas and indicators needs to be adapted to accommodate different understandings and perspectives on SEA.

Exploring the psychology of trade-off decision-making in environmental impact assessment

Dealing with trade-offs lies at the heart of environmental impact assessment (EIA). However, there has been scant reflection to date on the concept of trade-offs within the EIA literature. This paper aims to contribute to the thinking about trade-offs by distilling key learning points from research conducted within the field of psychology. In particular, the paper explores three interrelated questions namely: When are trade-off decisions difficult? How do we react when faced with difficult trade-off decisions? And how can we deal with difficult trade-off decisions? The research confirms that EIA functions within a very difficult trade-off decision-making context and that observed behaviour related to these difficult decisions can be explained from a psychology perspective. In order to deal better with trade-off decisions, it is helpful to be able to predict decision difficulty and anticipate resultant behaviour. Moreover, the way we present and frame decisions affects their outcomes.

Performance of environmental impact assessment (EIA) screening in South Africa: a comparative analysis between the 1997 and 2006 EIA regimes

Between September 1997 and March 2006, 43,423 environmental impact assessment (EIA) applications were submitted in South Africa. This exceptionally high number reflects a particular weakness in the ability of the EIA system to effectively screen EIA applications. The 2006 EIA Regulations intended to reduce the number of EIA applications by 20%. This paper presents a comparative analysis of screening performance before and following the 2006 EIA Regulations in order to determine the improvement of screening effectiveness (and hence the EIA process) since the interventions introduced in the 2006 EIA Regulations. Changes in the number of EIA applications as well as the types of activities requiring EIA are analysed. The results show that the average number of EIA applications submitted per month reduced by 27% nationally from 1997 to 2006. Although the 20% reduction target has been achieved, the number of EIA applications remains high compared with international trends and considered against the available administrative capacity. Analysis of the Free State Province also shows that, for both periods, very similar types of activities triggered the majority of EIA applications, with transformation of land, construction of masts and storage of fuel being the most common. To improve EIA screening, it is recommended that the reduction target be reconsidered and that additional screening methods such as environmental management frameworks and norms and standards be implemented.

Demonstrating the benefits of impact assessment for proponents

This paper is a call for more studies that explicitly demonstrate the benefits of impact assessment to proponents. While the community of impact assessment practitioners generally believe that impact assessment is beneficial (to all stakeholders), empirical demonstration of this, particularly to project proponents, is warranted, and especially in financial terms. While many impact assessment benefits are intangible in nature, learning from the business and management literature shows how such benefits can usefully be measured based upon perceptions of managers within proponent agencies in tandem with archival material. A framework of the nature of impact assessment benefits for proponents, and their relative tangibility, is presented along with a five-step methodology for determining benefits. We now call upon impact assessment researchers and practitioners alike to use this framework and methodology to structure investigations from practice that will contribute to an empirical database for demonstrating the benefits of impact assessment to proponents.

Environmental management frameworks: results and inferences of report quality performance in South Africa

Environmental management frameworks (EMFs) were developed in South Africa as strategic environmental management instruments to map environmental sensitivity in order to aid the screening out of undesired developments and to minimise unnecessary project level environmental impact assessment (EIA) in preferred development areas. This article reports on the quality performance of a sample of seven EMFs conducted in South Africa, in terms of document and procedural quality. To this end, 13 measures (sub-criteria) were developed and classified into five thematic areas (review criteria), against which the EMF documents were appraised using a six-level rating. The review criteria were developed around the validity of sensitivity mapping methodology; the extent to which potential developments were identified as either desired or unfavourable; the effectiveness of EMF outcomes in relation to the broader decision making context; integration of stakeholder engagement inputs into EMF outcomes and the sufficiency of provisions spelling out the implementation of EMF outcomes. Public participation emerged as the weakest component of EMF practice, while certain aspects of sensitivity analysis also performed weaker than other review areas. More focus is required on aligning scales and resolutions of map inputs, mapping methods and general integration of spatial data. The practice of conducting EMF is well established, and can make a valuable contribution to inform strategic planning and to improve the effectiveness of EIA screening in South Africa, provided that appropriate improvements in quality are made, along with proper implementation of the instrument by the authorities, including their formal adoption.

International perspectives on the strengthening of impact assessment through integration and focus

This paper consolidates international responses to the argument that there is a need to strengthen impact assessment (IA) through greater integration and focus. It is based on invited reflections by various international authors in the field of IA. The main conclusions are that power and context are important underlying reasons for the diversity of IA types; that in certain instances IA legislation works against achieving integration and focus; and that there is a pressing need to be able to measure and demonstrate added value and effectiveness in practice. The paper concludes by setting a research agenda reflecting the need to better understand why diversity exists in IA, what stakeholders expect from the process and how to improve practice based on greater understanding of what the various types of IA deliver.

The performance of environmental impact assessment in the explosives manufacturing industry in South Africa

Explosives manufacture in South Africa is a major component of the chemical and mining industry, and as an important producer of hazardous chemicals it is also a potential contributor to significant environmental impacts. Environmental authorisation of explosives manufacturing activities is based primarily upon the quality of information made available in the Environmental Impact Report (EIR), but the quality of EIR for explosives manufacturing projects has never been investigated. A modified version of the Lee and Colley review package was used to determine the EIR quality of a sample of four explosives projects. The findings reveal that the EIRs were of a generally satisfactory quality, but with some areas of weakness that are readily linked to potentially significant environmental impacts, pointing to limitations in the EIA process regarding the production of explosives. Recommendations include improved training of EIA practitioners, the use of quality review checklists and external specialist review, development of guidelines and the use of risk assessment as additional tools to the EIA regulations.

Reflections of the outgoing editors

As the outgoing Editors of Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal (IAPA), we would like to take this opportunity to provide some reflections from our experience in the role over the past six years. We thought it would be interesting to share some of the characteristics of the authors and reviewers we have interacted with and some thoughts for aspiring IAPA authors on how to maximise the chances of having a manuscript accepted for publication. We end with some thanks to those who have helped us. First we wholeheartedly welcome Riki Therivel into the role. We wish her every success as the new Editor of IAPA and hope that she enjoys the experience as much as we have. We imagine that Riki will be known to many readers of IAPA already, especially for her leading international work in strategic environmental assessment and valuable insights into the sustainability appraisal process in England. Riki has been responsible for all new submissions to the journal since the beginning of September 2014. There is however an understandable lag between receiving new manuscript submissions and actual publication of the resulting papers. As such, this is the final issue of IAPA for which we have been fully responsible in the Editor role for all the papers that appear in it. As can be seen from this issue, the journal continues to attract a diversity of high quality submissions from around the world. It is to these characteristics of our authors and our reviewers that we now turn our attention. During our tenure as Editors we received over 270 manuscript submissions to IAPA, of which over 130 papers have subsequently been published in the journal. These figures do not include Special Issue papers handled by guest editors, although on occasion we provided some reviews, advice or decisions on special issue submissions too. In round figures there were more than 420 authors associated with the total manuscript submissions we received, representing 60 countries of the world. Figure 1 illustrates the relative number of authors per country and it demonstrates that IAPA is truly an international journal. We also engaged with some 370 reviewers from 32 countries. A comparison of the frequency of author and reviewer activity is depicted in Table 1, in which we have attempted to account for the nationality of each author (including co-authors) and reviewer alike. Although this may come as somewhat of a surprise, the Editor process is not an exact science and the numbers depicted in the table are indicative, rather than absolute (and further, the percentages have been rounded to the nearest whole number). The main reason for this is that the nationality and country of residence and/or affiliation of authors and reviewers might differ. In our analysis, we have tried to capture the nationality rather than residence and/or affiliation because this provides to our view a better reflection of the international profile of the journal. Other factors that complicate the analysis are the combination of authors for certain papers as well as the iterative nature of the review process, which sometimes lead to more than one round of review. Data disclaimers aside, there are some interesting points to be realised from Figure 1 and Table 1. It is clear that English-speaking countries dominate, which is perhaps to be expected, but this highlights an ongoing challenge to encourage and enable people from nonEnglish-speaking countries to successfully publish in the journal. This is important for progressing impact assessment because of the extensive and growing practice in these countries. In this regard maybe lessons could also be learned from non-English-speaking European countries that currently feature in Table 1 such as the Netherlands, Portugal and Italy. The authorships from these countries are possibly due to established International Association for Impact Assessment (IAIA) affiliates and general involvement with the organisation. It is also noticeable for example that these countries have all hosted an international IAIA conference in recent years. Overall the membership profile of IAIA (http://www.iaia.org/ membership/) is drawn from over 120 countries which includes increasing representation from regions such as South America and Asia. Herein lies an obvious opportunity to further grow the IAPA authorship, especially since there seems to be some correlation between the membership numbers by region and the author frequency of corresponding countries such as Australia, the UK and Canada. Table 1 shows that the top five ranking countries are the same for both author and reviewer frequency (Australia, Canada, the UK, South Africa and the Netherlands), and others appear nearby to these in both lists (e.g. the USA, New Zealand and Italy). This perhaps reflects our tendency to try and ensure that at least one reviewer comes from the same country of origin as an author, especially for papers with country-specific content. Our experience with IAPA is also that in general people seem more willing to review for a journal in which they also publish. So if the authorship of IAPA papers is expanded, the pool of reviewers could similarly grow at the same time. We also found that members of IAIA and those that actively publish in IAPA were easier to secure as reviewers relative to others. In terms of the number of