Environmental Impact Assessment [Eia] and Value Judgements: Foundations for New Methodologies

Abstract

“A good law must be good for everyone, in exactly the same way that a true proposition is true for all”, M J. Condorcet.

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosopy “, W. Shakespeare, Hamlet.

Environmental Problems are increasingly acquiring an epistemological and ethical dimension. On the one hand we believe that the solutions to environmental emergencies can derive from better application and further elaboration of current scientific knowledge; on the other hand, some—who are still a minority, but are growing in number and authority—argue that in order to overcome the current impasse it is necessary to replace old paradigms from both natural sciences and social sciences.

In modern societies the environmental question is primarily a problem of public policy and development policy, however the weakening of collective consensus on development guidelines and goals, as well as on the analytical tools for the understanding of social phenomena, entangles public decision-making.

While traditional decision-making theories—from the rational action theory to the theory of bounded rationality, from systems analysis to negotiation approaches, and the analytical tools derived from them—refer to a generally shared and stationary system of values, today's society is pluralistic, composite and characterized by rapidly drifting values. Furthermore ethical principles tend to be rapidly revised. Planning of public choices—assuming that planning is a category of a social change in modern societies—can be successful only in a social milieu in which actors agree on behavioral and ethical rules.

This paper should be considered an introduction to a research project the goal of which will be the design of methodologies of Environmental Impact Assessment [Eia] capable of coping with a society whose members bear different values and goals, and envisage different future development scenarios. We maintain that it is necessary to study new Eia methodologies that take into account the value judgement question and the existence in societies of conflicting ethical principles.

Key wordy:

• decison making
• environmental impact assessment
• public policy