Towards effective scoping in strategic environmental assessment

Abstract

The scoping phase in strategic environmental assessment (SEA) is considered a central issue for the effectiveness of the whole SEA process, enhancing decision-making. Understanding SEA should be context-specific and scoping is paramount for a robust SEA; the main goal of this research was to develop a framework for the evaluation of the procedural effectiveness of the scoping stage in a specific political and planning system context – Portugal. The framework developed comprises a set of 21 criteria divided into six broad themes and was applied to 20 Portuguese SEA scoping reports, through content analysis. Overall, it was found that mandatory issues in the Portuguese SEA context were met and the scoping reports used mainly national guidelines. However, issues of public participation are often discarded and there is no evidence that scoping starts early in the decision-making process, or if it is done concurrently. Nonetheless, the framework developed establishes best practice for the SEA scoping phase, needing to be adapted to the different political and planning system contexts in order to reflect legal and institutional specificities.

Keywords::

• strategic environmental assessment
• effectiveness evaluation
• scooping
• criteria
• content analysis

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for the valuable comments and suggestions, which improved the paper. The authors would also like to acknowledge the valuable collaboration of Clara Cintrão from the Portuguese Environmental Agency.

Notes

^1. This law was recently replaced by the new Environmental Basis Law (Law n. 19/2014, of 14 April).

^2. Amended by the Decree-Law n. 58/2011, adding minor changes.

^3. Amended and republished by Decree-Law n. 46/2009, amended by Decree-Law n. 181/2009 and Decree-Law n. 2/2011.

^4. These public authorities include not only environmental authorities but also health authorities, regional authorities and local authorities

^5. As shown by Fischer and Onyango (2012), there are three main journals which publish on SEA: EIA Review, IAPA and JEAPM. These three journals appear at b-on (www.b-on.pt).

^6. Nomenclature of territorial units for statistics (Eurostat 2011).

^7. Special plans (Partidário 2005) or special plans for spatial planning (Cardoso & Breda-Vázquez 2007) or spatial environmental planning (Fidélis & Sumares 2008) are plans that protect natural resources.