Participatory engagement and social research: methods toolkit

2. Principles and Challenges of SEIA

There are a number of key principles drawn upon in this toolkit. The list below is adapted from the International Association for Impact Assessment^[1], and Vanclay’s Lessons for SIA^[2]. In Section 5, methods are analysed against these principles to demonstrate what each method can be used for.

The principles are:

• To treat communities with sensitivity and respect.
• To build trust between communities, and developers, decision-makers, and stakeholder groups.
• To enable a better understanding of the community, developing locally appropriate ideas and mitigation strategies.

It is also worth noting that:

• SEIA is about process as well as measuring impacts; it is about the ways in which impacts are assessed as well as the types of impacts that are assessed.
• The process of identifying and assessing impacts, weighing up options, and making decisions is as important as the outcome.
• The way engagement is conducted may generate impacts or be an impact in itself.
• Trained social researchers need to carry out social aspects of the SEIA with communities.
• Discussions with communities should start early and be ongoing.
• Any methods need to be effective, genuine, and meaningfully used.
• The approach should build on local knowledge.
• Two-way communication is needed, with a collaborative approach to decision-making, and using participatory processes of identification, assessment and management of social impacts.
• Stakeholders should be involved in the assessment of socio-economic impacts, the analysis of alternatives, and monitoring of the planned development or intervention.

Challenges:

• Potential social impacts (positive and negative) are often not sufficiently understood to be fully scoped into assessments. Social costs and benefits may not be measurable or quantifiable and therefore not adequately considered.
• Social impacts are much broader than the issues often considered in EIAs (such as demographic changes, job issues, financial security, and impacts on family life). All issues that affect people, directly or indirectly, are pertinent to social impact assessment.
• Fully understanding, defining, and predicting social impacts needs careful consideration, and reflection on the methods used.

2.1. Additional challenges specific to a marine context

Vanclay (2012)^[3] notes that SEIA in a coastal and marine setting follows broadly the same principles as SEIA for land-based settings. Nonetheless, Mabon et al (2017)^[4] identify some unique challenges for SEIA around marine activities:

• New activities in the sea may not be immediately visible or detectable to citizens; any discussions about impacts have the potential to have an impact themselves, if community members were unaware of any proposed changes and initial scoping work being carried out.
• The seas and coasts, and activities taking place within them, carry significant cultural meaning; and this may be difficult to articulate and capture.
• Related, understandings of 'ownership' of or interest in the sea may transcend conventional geographical boundaries. There may thus be a need to extend community engagement and impact assessment beyond the locality to encompass other coastal communities with an interest in the well-being of the marine environment;
• In the context of a marine development or intervention that is aimed at mitigating climate change, impact assessment ought to be cognisant of the possibility that doing nothing may be the most harmful option of all if it contributes to continued and unabated climate change. This is an especially pointed issue for coastal communities, given the vulnerability of coastal infrastructures and industries to ocean acidification, rising sea levels, and extreme weather events.

These principles have been distilled into a number of key points, against which methods are compared and analysed. This is included in Table 3.