The use of social media in impact assessment: experiences among national infrastructure developers in Denmark

ABSTRACT

Social media plays an increasingly prominent role in the interaction between impact assessments and society. Impact assessment is thus becoming part of social networks that are claimed to be able to improve interaction between actors in impact assessment processes. By investigating the use of social media in impact assessment and planning processes of national linear infrastructure development, we explore how social media impinge on participatory practices and how the potential of social media is realized in the current use related to public participation processes. The study focuses on experiences among national developers working in road, rail, electricity, gas, and metro infrastructures in Denmark. The article shows that the current use of social media in public participatory practices is limited to branding and on-way communication and that the increasing use of social media in linear infrastructure planning gives rise to a variety of concerns among developers that are related to especially organizational cultures, perception of the target groups, and prioritization of resources.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• impact assessment
• linear infrastructures
• Denmark
• public participation

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Danish ForskEL programme under Grant 12130. Thanks to the developers for an open discussion about experiences with and future use of social media.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the ForskEL [12130];