Environmental assessment: a third division subject at the university

ABSTRACT

High-quality environmental assessments (EA) require expert practitioners. These need to be adequately educated, trained and have professional experience. The basic education place currently is the university. Several studies have focused on EA university programmes, but none of them has looked at the lecturers who teach this subject. We have analysed 200 EA lecturers from 104 courses in 46 universities in Spain, concluding that their specialization in EA is low, none has knowledge in more than two-thirds of EA-related topics and only 2.5% of them have published in 1 of the 3 main refereed EA journals in the last 10 years. We suggest that this is connected with the controversial selection criteria of lecturers, and to a fragmentation of EA teaching, divided among the most varied departments. EA must stop being a third division subject at the university and become an independent branch of knowledge, which will result in better education of students and an increase in specific scientific production.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental impact assessment (EIA)
• lecturer
• Spain
• university

Concern about the quality of environmental statements and about the improvement in environmental assessment (EA) processes is a recurring topic. As Bond et al. (2018) argue, effective impact assessment depends on good quality impact assessment. One aspect that has directly influenced EA quality is practitioners’ expertise. Practitioners knowledge and skills on EA can be acquired in various ways, such as education, training and experience (Sánchez and Mitchell 2017), and a good dose of common sense (Ross et al. 2006).

Several works highlight the importance of education, training and capacity building to improve EA (e.g. Alemagi et al. 2007; Glasson and Salvador 2000; Ahmad and Wood 2002; Cherp and Golubeva 2004; Ali 2007; Jay et al. 2007; Badr 2009; Jalava et al. 2010; Van Loon et al. 2010; Clausen et al. 2011; Wu et al. 2011; Zhang et al. 2013). One of the paths for acquiring knowledge on EA is tertiary education. Well-prepared students will probably be able to develop earlier and to a greater depth EA skills than those who have deficiencies in their education and avoid future practitioners reproducing current poor practices (Sánchez 2010).

University education on EA in Spain has only been in place for a few decades. In the 1980s and early 1990s, it was a marginal subject taught in project courses in civil, forestry and agronomic engineering, and in a few universities. In the 1990s, the degree of environmental sciences was introduced in Spain, which includes environmental impact assessment (EIA) as a compulsory subject. This degree quickly spread through Spanish universities, and we would suggest perhaps too fast as there were no specialized lecturers in EA for so much demand. Gradually, other knowledge branches also embraced EIA, such as biology or geography, and in a more limited way other engineering associated disciplines. At present, there are more than 100 EA courses taught in nearly half of the Spanish universities.

Each professional branch influenced EA in their own specific ways, considering their professionals to be most suitable. This gave rise to an atomization of this subject in the universities between faculties and departments, preventing its development as an independent subject, and remaining subordinated as something accessory to the main departments’ scope; this ‘absence of a clear disciplinary home’ (Fischer and Jha-Thakur 2013) is dragged into the present. Gazzola (2008) identified two EA conceptual branches, social and physical science, to which engineering would be added; and even within these areas, there are appreciable differences between EA programmes.

Different authors have addressed university EA education, but often focusing on programmes, evaluating them or proposing guidelines (Stelmack et al. 2005; Fischer et al. 2008; Gazzola 2008; Ramos et al. 2008; Sánchez and Morrison-Saunders 2010; Weiland 2012; Fischer and Jha-Thakur 2013). Frequently, associated research is based on interviews with EA lecturers, which implies a bias, because the influence of academic staff on the quality of teaching is not evaluated.

Allusions to lecturers are scarce: Stelmack et al. (2005) note a lack of lecturers’ enthusiasm in the EA process in Canada; Ramos et al. (2008) stated that there may be a problem with teachers’ inexperience or lack of knowledge with regard to more difficult EA issues; Weiland (2012) suggested that more EIA experts should teach, but it is difficult to integrate them into strongly formalized bachelors and masters courses; Fischer et al. (2014) pointed out that training of teachers was of key importance to EA effectiveness in Pakistan; and Kabera (2017) indicated that in Rwanda EIA is taught by recent graduates without experience.

A quick glance to Spain allows to detect a mismatch between the large number of EA courses in universities and the ‘quality’ of lecturers teaching them. There are scarce publishing activities on EA, i.e. there are a lot of academics involved in teaching but very little academic production. This lack is not justified by a dominance of practitioners working as part time lecturers; conversely, most are full-time lecturers. However, these do not participate in professional events, such as the national EIA conference organized by the Spanish branch of IAIA. This leads to the question as to who is teaching EA at the university in Spain.

To answer this question, we analysed EA courses and lecturers in Spanish universities during 2017/2018 and 2018/2019. We analysed 104 courses where EA is the main subject from 46 universities, accounting for 200 lecturers. For each lecturer, we searched for publications (papers on Scopus) and papers specifically related to EA. In addition, we analysed papers published by Spanish authors in three EA specialized international journals: Environmental Impact Assessment Review (EIAR), Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal (IAPA) and Journal of Environmental Assessment Policy and Management (JEAPM) during the last 10 years (2009–2018; following Fischer and Onyango 2012).

The productivity of EA lecturers on average is reasonable, but only thanks to 45.5% of them having produced a reasonable amount of papers, while 18.5% have not had any paper included in Scopus (although in Spain, this is said to be a selection merit for lecturers). The average number of EA-related papers per lecturer is close to 1, again thanks to a minority of academics with a high production, while 68% of them do not have any paper related to EA at all.

Overall, it is found that lecturers in environmental sciences and biology have the greatest specialization. Civil and forestry engineering occupy a second position, agricultural engineering has a lower specialization and very low production and geography shows the worst results with minimum lecturers’ specialization and publication activities.

The average number of lecturers per course varies between almost 4 in biology and 1.4 in geography. Some universities include up to seven lecturers per course, most of them without EA specialization. The large number of staff involved appears to be an attempt to compensate for the lack of specialized teaching staff.

Almost 11% of universities do not have any publications from their EA teaching staff, and in 43.5%, lecturers have never published an EA-related paper. The average number of EA lecturers per university exceeds 4, reaching in some cases very high values (11–16). This high number of lecturers is due to the fragmentation of the EA topic; instead of creating EA departments, the subject is divided and attached to departments of ecology, zoology, botany, chemistry, physics, transportation, physical geography, agriculture, or projects, even within the same university. On average, each department appoints their EA lecturers, but usually they are not experts, because they are specialized in a department’s main working area.

The number of Spanish authors that have published in the three main EA journals (EIAR, IAPA and JEAPM) in the last 10 years accounts for 95, with 129 papers. These journals are the most logical place to publish research outputs related to EA, so it can reasonably be expected that researchers specialized in this area publish in them frequently. However, the publishing recurrence of Spanish authors is low, with a vast majority of them (79%) having only published once in the last 10 years; researchers occasionally address EA, but few do regularly. Of all authors, only 5 are currently EA lecturers (2.5%), while the other 90 do not teach the subject, although most are also university lecturers; EA lecturers do not publish on EA, and EA researchers do not teach EA.

As EA is an add-on subject in departments specialized in other subjects, the selection of lecturers depends on the main scope of the department, and not to EA, and this perpetuates the lack of specialization. The absence of EA departments produces a lack of EA researchers. Research careers in EA are constrained by the limited scope and availability of impact assessment modules in academia (González 2015).

We conclude that selection criteria of EA lecturers are controversial and that EA is a third division subject at universities, fragmented and distributed among the most varied departments. However, this undesirable situation can be solved if there is willingness on the part of universities. We propose the following measures:

• EA lecturers should be selected attending to their specialization (at least partial) in this subject, not in others.

• Lecturers must have previous knowledge of EA and not acquire them while teaching: experience must be a requirement and not acquired a posteriori.

• EA is a multidisciplinary subject, so lecturers may have different academic qualifications; the key issue is EA specialization.

• The participation of expert practitioners enriches teaching in EA, but often their access to university positions, even part time, is very difficult.

• The profile for selection of EA lecturers should be rational, not mixing disparate subjects, which makes specialization impossible.

• It is desirable to create multidisciplinary EA departments instead of fragmenting this subject among different departments. Simpler solutions are promoting collaboration between departments (Gazzola 2008) or establishing common EA theory and practise principles (Morgan et al. 2012).

• There is no need to have dozens of EA lecturers at each university; it is better to have a smaller number with greater specialization.

• Universities should assign their human talent with academic excellence criteria; there are not specialized lecturers teaching EA and experts not teaching it.