Practice issues for integrating strategic social assessment into the setting of environmental limits: insights from Canterbury, New Zealand

Abstract

There is mounting concern in New Zealand and worldwide about the impacts of current and projected land-use activities on freshwater quality. In 2011, the New Zealand government effected the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management, requiring all regional councils to establish freshwater nutrient loads and water allocation measures in their land and water regional plans. These ‘limits’ must achieve locally defined social, economic and cultural outcomes while, as a minimum, halting any decline in water quality. The authors have participated in the Canterbury region’s strategic land and water planning activities. This has involved strategically assessing the social impacts of ‘limit options’ on aspects of catchment life and then integrating them into official reports and community deliberations, which ultimately inform the development of rules for catchment land use. This paper highlights practice issues which were confronted in the process and how they were managed.

Keywords:

• Social assessment
• integrated assessment
• strategic catchment planning
• environmental limits
• local knowledge

Introduction

There is growing concern in New Zealand about the impacts of historic, current and projected, human activity on the nation’s freshwater systems. In the news media, pastoral agriculture, particularly intensive dairy farming, is routinely singled out as the primary cause for this concern but the issue is far more complex. Urban intensification and associated point source discharges (i.e. storm water and municipal wastes), sediment from land clearance and development, and contaminant discharges from industrial sites together impact on New Zealand’s freshwater systems. The increasing pressure on New Zealand’s rivers, lakes, aquifers, wetlands and streams, has signalled an urgent need for a ‘fresh start for freshwater’ management (Land & Water Forum 2010, 2012), one which must better balance the significant economic benefits of agricultural land-use intensification and urban development with environmental integrity and improvement. Over the last decade, the New Zealand government has responded to this challenge with an inquiry into the science and state of water quality (Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment 2012), the formation of a national water-stakeholder advisory group known as the Land and Water Forum (2012) and the development and implementation of the National Policy Statement (NPS) for Freshwater Management. The NPS is of particular importance in establishing principles and providing guidance for land and water planning in New Zealand. It came into effect in 2011 and requires all regional councils to establish realistic and enforceable environmental limits within their land and water regional plans (Taylor & Mackay 2013).

This paper discusses a set of practice issues experienced by a team of social assessment practitioners involved in an integrated and participatory approach to the setting of environmental limits. The process was applied at the catchment scale in the Canterbury region of New Zealand’s South Island and was overseen by the region’s main regulatory authority, Environment Canterbury (ECan). Catchments across the Canterbury region have experienced a significant level of agricultural land-use change in recent years, underpinned by the development of a number of new irrigation schemes, some very large, and an associated shift in land use from extensive dryland sheep and beef farming to intensive dairying. Residential subdivision is another feature of the rural changes evident in the region. Such changes are at the heart of the Canterbury environmental limit-setting process, which seeks to articulate (in formal and informal plans) environmental bottom lines and also guidelines for land-use best practice. The limits and associated guidelines comprise a combination of river nutrient loads and water allocation and land management measures set at a level to at least halt any decline in the quality of local waterbodies, while also achieving community-defined social, economic and cultural outcomes (Snelder et al. 2013).

The main role of the social assessment team was to work in an integrated manner with other technical specialists whilst also engaging with stakeholders and affected communities through the participatory planning process designed by ECan. The technical team was formed to help local planners and affected communities and stakeholders explore and debate scenarios of different environmental limit-setting regimes, with the aim of developing a fair, optimum regime for their particular catchment. In practice, this involved strategically assessing, with the aid of local insight, the social impacts of the various land-use change scenarios on different aspects of catchment life, then integrating technical findings into community deliberations, proposed solutions and associated reporting.

Applications of impact assessment in this type of process are known internationally as strategic environmental assessments (SEA). SEA is widely accepted amongst practitioners as the preferred approach to applying impact assessment to policies, plans and programmes. They contribute both to the planning process and the decision-making process (Tetlow & Hanusch 2012). Baines and Taylor (2002) point out that strategic application of social assessment can assist SEA by developing more socially sensitive policy and plans and by setting the context for project-level social assessments. Applications of strategic assessment can be at a spatial level, as with a catchment (as in the Canterbury experience) or at a sector level, as with water management, hydro-electricity or irrigation schemes. With water, the catchment makes considerable sense as both a spatial and systemic integrating framework for assessment practice (Taylor et al. 2008). International examples, such as planning for the Severn River catchment (Environment Agency 2014), have seen the application of SEA in a broad way, weighing up different policy options for water management plans. In these strategic assessments, however, the social component appears to be an implicit component rather than an explicit social assessment input throughout the process.

The paper begins with background information about the Canterbury case – the origins of the environmental limit-setting process and its basic format. The paper then provides a discussion of some professional practice issues for integrating social assessment into strategic catchment planning. While these practice issues have arisen specifically within the Canterbury (New Zealand) limit-setting experience, the authors believe they will be of interest and relevance to social impact assessment practitioners across other regional and national jurisdictions. The paper concludes with a set of ‘take home’ messages.

Limit-setting: the Canterbury case

As noted above, the NPS requires all regional councils in New Zealand to set in their land and water plans realistic and enforceable water quality and quantity limits for natural waterways. These limits are designed to improve water quality (including nutrients, sediment and bacteria) and restore flows in streams and rivers, while managing the effects of land use. Once set, limits define the nutrient loss levels (nitrogen and phosphorous) for people to manage to. They also define minimum river flows and therefore the water available for irrigation and other purposes. Central to the limit-setting process in Canterbury has been the involvement of the community and water stakeholders in strategic catchment planning activities. This is consistent with ECan’s declared preference for community involvement in all its water management activities, as specified in the Canterbury Water Management Strategy (CWMS). The CWMS is broadly defined as

… a partnership between ECan, Ngai Tahu [the regional iwi or tribe], Canterbury’s district and city councils and key water stakeholders. It aims to build community consensus about how Canterbury’s precious freshwater resources should be managed, both now and in the future. (ECAN 2011, Foreword)

Innovatively, the CWMS divides the Canterbury region into 10 water catchments or zones, each with its own ‘Zone Committee’, a local water governance group comprising appointed community, local government and industry representatives. Zone Committees, communities and water stakeholders, with the help of technical advisory teams (including social and economic impact assessment specialists), together explore the interrelated impacts of land‐uses and water management options on local waterways, social life, culture and economy. Land-use ‘change scenarios’ are used to provide the participants with a focus for debate and a basis upon which to explore and derive preferred water quality and quantity limits for their catchments which, at the end of the process, are compiled as a set of official planning recommendations and a set of local actions and initiatives such as stream restoration activities. While the process is participatory in intent and process, it still relies on technical planning for the eventual planning instrument and potentially can result in a legalistic challenge by any dissatisfied party – Sinner et al. (2015) provide a critique of the extent to which this overall process is genuinely collaborative.

Typically, the Canterbury process has involved a series of workshops held in local community centres or halls (Macdonald et al. 2014). These open public events have generally been well attended by local citizens and water stakeholders. They commonly start with an open conversation about the state of water quality in each catchment and emerging/changing trends in land use and the impacts of these changes on water systems, local economy, cultural values, water-based recreation and community life. This open conversation – facilitated by ECan and Zone Committee representatives – is informed by insights delivered by a core group of technical advisors (including the economic, environmental and social impact assessors) who present, and seek to refine with the help of ‘local’ input, their interpretations of the ‘current state’ or baseline.

Once there is general agreement as to the baseline, the community typically explores in subsequent workshops the impacts of a range of change scenarios or ‘limit options’ (Norton et al. 2012). In broad terms, the scenarios range between either expansions of intensive farming, focused on achieving economic outcomes, or reductions in intensive farming, focused around strong constraints on intensification and farm mitigation practices to achieve ‘green’ outcomes. The technical team inform (but do not dictate) the ensuing conversations using the best available science to predict the future consequences of each change scenario across a set of agreed social, economic, environmental and cultural values. The aim is to stimulate an informed debate within the community about preferred, fairly distributed and sustainable development pathways. The outcomes of these discussions are recorded and disseminated publically and contribute to the Zone Committee’s development of a ‘solutions package’ for the catchment which lays out for ECan (the regulator) a preferred pathway of planning measures, community initiatives, monitoring procedures and mitigations.

A successful method to integrate the input of technical experts, planners, zone committees and stakeholders in this participatory process is a framework of catchment outcomes and technical indicators. These outcomes and indicators provide an important tool for integrating social analysis into the wider assessment. The best indicators are those that are useful from a technical point of view but also provide a means for community and scientific discussions. An example is that under the general heading of a catchment outcome of a diverse and viable economy and rural communities, the social assessor might consider a number of social indictors such as the number and size of farms, employment on- and off-farm, population and school rolls. The experience was that effective indicators provide points for debate and testing of data both during community workshops and technical team meetings. Sometimes, stakeholders place undue emphasis on quantitative data that are not necessarily robust, with unrealistic expectations about what quantitative data might deliver. Useful indicators for social assessment variables have either a quantitative or qualitative ‘measure’ (Burdge 2004).

An example of social impact variables typically explored over several catchments in a scenario of agricultural intensification is presented in Table 1. The table provides a generic summary of social impact variables and links to bio-physical factors, excluding variations due to local context and experiences in any particular catchment. The communities typically have an active role in developing this sort of framework of priority social (includes health) impacts and agreed indicators along with the social assessors and Zone Committees.

Table 1. Examples of common social impact variables in scenario development.

Social impact variable	Source and nature of impacts (depending on the scenario)	Who is affected by it
Health risks from contaminated water	Nitrogen leaching from intensified land uses, potentially mitigated to some extent by farm management practices or dilution by alpine water – nitrogen and/or bacteria causes users to monitor wells more regularly, sink costly deeper wells or buy bottled water to feed babies	Rural households with shallow wells, community and urban supplies from deeper wells (additional costs), especially vulnerable are families with babies. Public health services are required to adopt a stronger public health role around water quality
Level of on-farm employment	Intensive, irrigated agricultural systems such as dairy farming generate on and off-farm employment, conversely reduction in levels of farming reduces employment	Farmers, employees, farm service industries, rural communities, social service providers
Demand for social and community services such as rural schools and health services, and businesses such as veterinarians and contractors	On-farm employment flows into population at a ratio of around 2:1 in rural areas that without intensive land uses are experiencing a decline in population and rural services	Farming communities; rural communities; rural businesses and social service providers
The level of diversified population and community cohesion	Newcomer farmers and families and migrant workers attracted to increased economic opportunity, potentially creating a demand for social change management	Rural communities particularly leaders and ‘anchor’ families; settlement support services; migrant workers’ families
Adoption of new technologies for irrigation, farm and riparian management; levels of training, tertiary education	New rules and urban pressures around farm management, riparian protection, nutrient leaching and ecological status of waterways; demand for new knowledge	Farmers, farm consultants and advisers, training organisations; farmer water and land management groups
Levels of farm debt; farmer stress	Capital investment in increasingly expensive farm land and conversion to intensive uses makes farms vulnerable to periods of low prices; commodity price cycles	Farmers and farm families; banks and rural lenders; farm financial advisers; rural support organisations; health services
Location and quality of recreational fishing	Ecological status of lakes and streams; numbers of fish such as trout, salmon and whitebait	Fishers, guides, accommodation and rural tourist businesses
Nature of contact recreation and level of recreational satisfaction	Visual appearance, bacterial levels of streams and water ways including cyanobacterial and other algal blooms	Swimmers, boaters, rowers, kayakers, sail board users and kite surfers (for example)

Practice issues for integrating social assessment into strategic catchment planning

A number of practical challenges were confronted in the process of integrating social impact assessment into the limit-setting community workshops and wider strategic planning activities. These include practice issues around: the availability of data used in the development of ‘baselines’ and subsequent assessments of the impacts of scenarios (or limit options); the importance and effectiveness of integrating local (qualitative) knowledge into the analysis; the timing of the assessments; and process issues and overall management of the planning and assessment programme. In this section of the paper, we collapse these challenges into three key main practice issues and discuss how they were managed/resolved within the process.

Data gaps, information acquisition and analysis

A specific problem encountered by the social impact assessors was a lack of social data (at the catchment scale) for use in the development of catchment baselines and community profiling. This was in stark contrast to biophysical data, which were available and often have been collected in the catchments over several decades. Any lack of official social statistics is particularly problematic. Due to the Canterbury earthquakes in 2010 and 2011, the scheduled 2011 national census in New Zealand was postponed to 2013, meaning that while population estimates were available, there were no official demographic data at the microlevel that allowed the team to explore local variations since the 2006 census. Yet, some of the catchments were known to have experienced recent demographic changes driven by shifts in local land use.

In order to capture local information about social change and build a detailed baseline, key informant interviews were undertaken in the catchments. The social impact assessors engaged directly with primary producers, local businesses people and retailers, school principals, teachers, law enforcement officers, health officials, irrigation scheme managers, recreationists, tourism managers, social sector representatives and agents from primary sector organisations. Some of these informants had lived in the catchment for several decades and were thus able to provide valuable insights into social change in their communities over many years. Others were more recent migrants but could still provide valuable observations of community life. Examples in the Canterbury case included a farmer encouraged to write down his observations of changes in a river system over 60 plus years, and a digger driver who observed the ecological health over time of drains he was clearing. From the outset, the social impact assessment team actively facilitated this local knowledge.

Direct engagement with workshop participants in the workshop environment was also an effective approach to build and refine the social baseline. Local people were often very willing to publically share their views about ‘how things were’ in the community and the trends underpinning their observations and experiences of local social change. Whilst some technical participants from other science backgrounds demonstrated initial discomfort with qualitative data, it was very evident community members readily accepted and contributed to such analysis. Science teams soon understood the value of narratives when working with communities, not just about social change, and incorporated this type of analysis in the reporting of environmental models and change as well.

A particular problem in development of social baselines and subsequent scenario assessments was a shortage of specific information on the effects of land-use change on river recreation, as compared to other forms of land and water use. This again required the assessors to make best use of quantitative and qualitative data in line with accepted social assessment practice. For example, New Zealand National Angler Surveys (e.g. Unwin 2009) provide longitudinal statistical data from which the team were able to extrapolate changes in river and lake use for angling. But to obtain local nuances, such as how locals fish in drains, irrigation canals and local streams, the social assessors again had to draw on key informant interviews and discussions during community workshops. For nearly all local recreation activities, interviews with local residents and representatives from recreation organisations were the primary source of information about the types of recreation activities that occur in a catchment, their location and how these patterns of river use have changed over time, if at all. These insights were cross-checked in additional interviews and also against secondary data sources located from the public domain, such as recreation guidebooks and internet sites.

Adopting a systematic approach to the collection of local knowledge is important, as the method needs to withstand testing if challenged in workshops and also in formal planning hearings. Where key informant interviews are used to gain access to local knowledge, ethical best practice is a primary concern for the social impact assessors, including the fundamental principle of informed and voluntary consent (Baines et al. 2013). Key informants are informed of the limit-setting process, how the information they provide could be used and why it is important and relevant, along with assurances of their anonymity and confidentiality in reporting. Anonymity is also preserved if individual comments from community workshop discussions are drawn on for the social assessment. This level of process and care is needed because significant economic, livelihood, recreational and other interests are involved in respect to the management of water.

Technical integration and information sharing (in the digital era)

The limit-setting process in Canterbury demands the integration of science from a variety of fields, including local knowledge (as described above). Integrating does not happen by accident (Baines & Morgan 2006). The approach has social and economic analysts working alongside those on catchment hydrology, water quality, land use and nutrient modelling, resulting in a series of technical summaries and presentations (a set for each change scenario explored).

An important issue present in the Canterbury process is the phasing, timing and delivery of particular technical areas of assessment work so that integration can be achieved within tight timelines. Given social assessments are interested in the social consequences of bio-physical effects, the social assessment team has to rely, for example, on receiving timely assessments of ecological effects on streams and water bodies in order to make an assessment of likely effects on recreation activity. Similarly, information on likely nitrates in groundwater is necessary to make any assessment of potential effects on drinking water standards and consequently on human health. Delays in the delivery of reports by others can at times place the social assessment team under extreme time pressure. Thus, in order to integrate social assessment fully in an integrated assessment, it is important to recognise, when setting up the process, the interdependence of inputs from different technical areas, modelling and community activities each with their own time requirements. These linkages can create stresses in a necessarily time-bound process.

Experiences from the information intensive Canterbury limit-setting process also highlight the need to establish sound assessment and data management protocols and very good communication channels (between planners, experts and the community/affected parties). In Canterbury, to help manage the considerable flow of information (including relevant scientific reports) and to provide open access to all data, a web page was developed for each catchment. The web pages are invaluable communication channels between local communities, technical advisors, zone committees and councils. Ostensibly, the provision of information online leads to more informed and transparent community/stakeholder discussions, but (from the vantage point of social impact assessors in the Canterbury process) the use of web pages for open access to technical information presents a set of issues:

•	Pressure goes on technical teams to post reiterations of material online, meaning the presence of a lot of changing technical information for the community to track, download and digest prior to each workshop. Further, the provision of information online does not always equate to accurate information interpretation and, therefore, online data need to be supported by good technical communication, with space in workshops for the community to enquire into and verbally debate the technical matters presented in the reports.
•	Tight planning timelines, when combined with the speed of the internet, at times create a sense of process hurriedness, which can face criticism and potentially a loss of trust in those facilitating the process. In the Canterbury limit-setting process, the period between workshops could be little more than four weeks. There was a reasonable expectation that the technical team had their reporting circulated and posted online prior to the workshops, in order to give the community adequate time to digest the information. As noted above, however, the careful integration of different types of impact assessment takes time to achieve. The examples above highlight the importance of establishing sound processes and reasonable expectations around the timing and flow of information between technical teams and the wider community.
•	‘Open (online) access does not automatically mean “access for all”’. For instance, it should not be assumed that all participants in a planning process have access to the same quality of internet and are able to download, print in colour or view the reports and participate (equally) in an informed manner. This is not always the case in New Zealand, particularly in rural areas where internet connectivity is sometimes problematic. This was recognised in the Canterbury process and alternative methods for accessing information were provided, so that those informed are not just those who are digitally connected. The simplest way of achieving this goal is to provide hard copies at meetings – then opening the possibility of a new criticism that the material should have been posted (snail mail) in advance!

Scenarios and future thinking

Scenario assessments deal with considerable uncertainty, challenging a participatory and multi-faceted approach. Informed discussion of scenarios requires all participants to think about futures. In the process of thinking about futures through scenarios participants attempt to consider catchment change and development over several decades and relate these to community interpretations. For instance, baseline data typically looks back over upwards of over 20 years of change, whilst scenarios usually attempt to look at least 30 years into the future. Most scientists accept catchments are complex systems where changes such as groundwater movements, climate and ecological decline or improvement are interrelated and take many years. Furthermore, rural communities in these catchments exhibit and comment on a host of interrelated changes driven by external factors that are local, regional, national and international (Taylor et al. 2001). There is also a mix of public policies that vary over time. Distinguishing longer-term social trends from those driven by explicit policies and plans, and those driven by underlying social trends, becomes a key challenge, one that relies on the availability of longitudinal data (Taylor et al. 2008). Because catchment change is so complex, there is no one simple way of exploring plausible futures. There will always be a level of uncertainty necessitating all participants to moderate expectations in the light of long-term trends, within an ethos of adaptive environmental management.

Conclusions

Experiences with application of strategic impact assessment in catchment planning in Canterbury, New Zealand, demonstrate that social assessment should be an integral part of the planning and assessment process throughout. There are real advantages evident in a catchment-based approach utilising integrated, strategic impact assessment as part of policy and planning design and the setting of environmental limits.

The Canterbury experience also identifies the importance of people who are skilled at working in the interface between science and communities and are sensitive to a range of political influences and difficulties of achieving fair outcomes. Skills needed include the ability to communicate and integrate technical matters, the ability to conceptualise bio-physical changes through to their social consequences and the ability to listen to various points of view and value local input and knowledge. There are also the usual project management skills around coordination, time planning and ability to work to deadlines as the process can easily become bogged down in data, meetings and endless deliberation.

Planners, impact assessors and scientists, community members and stakeholders need to communicate and plan well together and keep what they hope to achieve to a manageable level. Integrated impact assessment embedded in planning processes involving the collaborative efforts of local communities and experts, backed by open access to information, should result in improved, fairer, environmental and social outcomes. Planning processes built on well-integrated strategic assessments result in successful implementation of formal and informal plans to achieve multiple desired outcomes. Implementation is tested and adapted by ongoing monitoring that includes social data and local knowledge.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge work of the technical leads at Environment Canterbury and the useful peer reviews they received on papers prepared for IAIA conferences in 2013 and 2015. Also, James Baines, Taylor Baines and Associates, and two anonymous reviewers provided comments.