Editorial: IA, alternative facts and fake news – Is the post-factual turn starting to turn?

Dear readers,

Welcome to the 2nd issue of IAPA in 2018. Last semester, my students rather unusually stumbled across impact assessment news in the mainstream media on numerous occasions. The reason for this was repeated claims made by David Davis, the UK government’s ‘Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union’ that his ‘Department for Exiting the European Union’ (DExEU) was preparing 50–60 impact assessments on the implications of the UK leaving the EU for different sectors, stating that these contained ‘excruciating detail’ (Roberts and Clarke 2017). In this context, the emerging ‘hard’ (economic) evidence – largely in line with what most independent experts had been predicting – was less positive than what he implied his IAs were suggesting. However, Davis was reluctant to share the reports with Parliament, business, the British and the European people. Following a motion in November 2017, though, he was asked to release them to the ‘Exiting the European Union Select Committee’. In a dramatic turn of events, on 6 December 2017, when giving evidence before this committee, he all of a sudden announced that ‘no such systematic IAs’ had been carried out.¹ In an apparent attempt to justify himself, he stated that he was ‘not a fan of economic models because they have all proven wrong’ (INEWS 2017, The Times 2017).

Leaving aside the question as to why a government secretary of state would convey an impression that IAs were being prepared when they were not (and also the lack of any consequences thereafter), thus taking ‘alternative facts’ to the ‘next level’, what is also striking from an international IA expert’s perspective is the notion that IAs should be mere economic models. This is even more surprising in the presence of an IA Toolkit for supporting UK government departments in their endeavors to conduct IAs of proposed policy (BIS 2011). This Toolkit suggests that the approach which should be followed is broadly in line with an internationally accepted understanding of what IAs comprise. Going beyond any narrow economic modeling notion, the Toolkit lays out that IAs should be participatory, transparent and open decision support procedures, consisting of various (logical) steps. The assessment of different options is said to be at the heart of IA, focusing on various economic and other impact areas. Any portrayal of IAs as ‘economic models’ is therefore flawed, even by the definitions used by the UK government (Fischer and Sykes 2017; Sykes and Fischer 2017).

Elsewhere, in another post-factual bluff, US president Trump called for ‘some good old global warming’ in response to an unusually cold winter in the Eastern part of North America (The Irish Times 2017). While in this context, the Guardian newspaper (2017) had suggested earlier that ‘denial and “alternative facts” haven’t stopped the Earth from warming to record-shattering levels’, French president Macron on 3 January 2018 announced that he ‘would overhaul French media legislation […] to fight the spread of “fake news” on social media’ which he said was a threat to liberal democracies (Reuters 2018). Again, from an IA perspective, this is highly relevant, as the non-evidence based ‘fake news’ phenomenon with an associated attack on ‘expert knowledge’ has been at the heart of the post factual turn which has also been described as an attack on the founding principles of IA (Fischer 2016). Whether these developments signify a turning point remains to be seen. For those interested in a socially and environmentally just sustainable global development, however, they will at least raise some hope.

Subsequently, five papers are brought to you in this issue of IAPA. A range of different topics are covered, including aboriginal peoples’ valued components and EIA, the role of social impact assessment in contributing to social development outcomes, the adoption of a logical framework in international development projects, indicators in SEA and river basin management plans and the coverage of cultural heritage in project management. Authors are from institutions representing five countries, including Norway, Italy, Portugal, South Africa and Canada. Enjoy reading!

Thomas B. Fischer
Editor-in-chief
[email protected]

Notes

1. Other bodies in contrast have undertaken IAs of the impacts of the UK leaving the EU and made the results publicly available. The European Parliament’s IA has been available since March 2017, while the US think-tank the RAND corporation’s IA on the implications for the US, EU and UK was published in December 2017.