Transforming IA from the outside in: capacity and levers for strategic assessment

ABSTRACT

Impact assessment (IA) is under pressure to respond to increasingly complex environmental challenges. This paper reflects on the future of IA and argues for a larger and more deliberate role for strategic assessment in response to the complexity and scale of problems being brought to the IA table. It also posits that the drivers for transformation in IA are likely to emerge from creative governance solutions external to IA, more so than from new IA tools, more data, or ‘better’ IA legislation.

KEYWORDS:

• Innovation
• strategic assessment
• impact assessment

Introduction

Who would have thought 5 years ago that ‘impact assessment’ (IA) would become a household name? This is certainly the case in Canada, owing in large part to two consecutive federal IA reforms (Canadian Environmental Assessment Act 2012; Impact Assessment Act 2019) – each of which sparked major conflict between industry, environmental organizations, and federal, provincial and Indigenous governments. Some of this conflict can be explained by the industry at the centre of IA reform – the fossil fuel industry (Lauerman 2018); some by mis-information or ‘alternative facts’ (Fischer 2018) about the implications of IA for the resource economy (Olzynski 2019); but most can be attributed to evolving expectations about what a project-based review and approvals instrument should accomplish and who influences decisions (Fischer 2017; Sinclair et al. 2018). As Gibson et al. (2016) write: ‘The world in which environmental assessment is now promoted and eroded is very different from the world into which environmental assessment was introduced 40 years ago. Our brave new context is more complex.’

This commentary is part of an IAPA special issue on ‘Impact assessment for the twenty-first century – what future’, edited by Thomas Fischer and Sara Bice. The editors have challenged contributors to reflect on the future of IA, including innovations and opportunities, and what will spark evolution or transformation. This paper responds to this challenge, drawing examples from the Canadian context but also reflecting on broader trends and futures in IA.

What does the future of impact assessment look like?

In its first 40 years, IA has ‘struggled to be much more than a slightly earlier, more open and better integrated process for environmental licensing of conventional projects’ (Gibson 2012). In recent years, however, IA has been stretched to tackle more complex issues and to do so more comprehensively and with a greater role for those most affected by the decisions taken (Noble 2017). This in part reflects the urgency of the issues at hand, from climate change and biodiversity loss (Lambers 2015) to human rights infringements and impacts to Indigenous lands (Graetz 2015). It is also a reflection of the mounting expectations for governments to respond, and a general perception that IA is (or is not) an appropriate tool to do so.

As a result, many of the most important issues brought to the table when projects are proposed are well beyond the scope of project IA – and certainly beyond the capacity of any one project proponent to resolve (Udofia et al. 2017). For example, in 2014, Spectra Energy (now Enbridge Inc.) submitted an IA application to construct an 850-kilometre natural gas pipeline corridor in western Canada, traversing the traditional territory of the Blueberry River First Nation. The Indigenous government demanded that the pipeline be rejected (Yahey 2014), but the concerns tabled reached far beyond the project at hand and were rooted in the legacy effects of industrial development, the prospects of future developments including the upstream potential for hydraulic fracturing, and the desire for a more comprehensive and strategic approach to assessment that would govern the nature and pace of development in their traditional territory (Noble 2017).

Expectations about how development should be managed are moving in the right direction, but project IA is not well-equipped to deal with these bigger picture issues and challenges that are far larger than any one project (Hegmann and Yarranton 2011). IA is thus at a critical juncture, both in Canada and globally, with at least two possible futures. One future, building on the status quo, is a project IA system that is over-burdened with issues and expectations that it is not sufficiently designed to address, resulting in increased conflict, delayed decisions, and only superficial treatment of the most pressing issues facing society including climate change, biodiversity loss, cumulative impacts and human rights issues. A second, and more optimistic future, is a project IA system that is embedded as part of a nested and integrated system of policy, plan, program and project assessment, evaluation, and decision-making, whereby strategic assessments are the norm rather than the exception, and projects are triggered and shaped not based solely on economic opportunity but based on carefully thought-out policy and planning objectives intended to address complex regional, national and international environmental challenges.

Where do the innovations and opportunities lie for impact assessment?

Given the above context, my core argument is that the future of IA is not defined so much by what happens ‘inside’ the assessment process (e.g. the techniques used, new spatial tools or technologies, more or better data), but by how IA is embedded in a larger system of integrated policy, planning and decision-making. This means a larger and more deliberate role for strategic assessment in the future, and arguably a very different role than present. In the context of rapid global environmental change and transformation, much greater attention must be given to the integrative role of strategic assessment as a means to support policy integration (Geißler et al. 2019) and shift current thinking from solely assessing the ‘impacts’ of planned actions toward informing choices about policy options and development trajectories that generate and enhance environmental and social values.

A major obstacle of course is that strategic assessment is largely approached as a compliance-based instrument (Noble et al. 2019) – often viewed as a legal procedure (Geißler et al. 2019; Partidario and Monteiro 2019) and implemented to comply with national directives (e.g. Canadian or European directive) or international member-state protocols (e.g. UNECE Protocol on SEA). Of course, there is nothing wrong with compliance, but approaching strategic assessment based solely on the need to comply with directives that are built largely on project-based IA thinking falls short in situating IA as a strategic instrument to help realize broader environmental sustainability goals and objectives (Noble and Nwanekezie 2017). Strategic assessment must transition away from being an instrument designed solely to assess the impacts of already proposed initiatives, to one that helps ‘promote democratization, knowledge and learning, and a joint understanding of, and agreement about, where we want to be headed as a society’ (Therivel and Gonzalez 2019, p. 181). Shifts in governance, more so than science or technologies, thus hold the most promising innovations and opportunities for IA in the future.

What will spark this century’s most important evolution in IA and what will be the results of that transformation?

Strategic assessment is a politically sensitive instrument (Lobos and Partidario 2014) – which may explain why policy makers and political decision-makers can be reluctant about its full integration. The innovations needed to advance strategic assessment are thus unlikely to be sparked solely by new or strengthened national IA legislation. There must be real recognition of the value added of strategic assessment and enough capacity to ‘pressure’ a political response. Innovation in IA is driven by both internal and external forces but, in the case of mainstreaming strategic assessment into the institutional fabric of policy formation, these innovations are likely to be sparked externally.

Of particular relevance, for those countries with Indigenous populations, are emerging and formal commitments to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which speaks to the rights of Indigenous peoples ‘to determine and develop priorities and strategies for the development or use of their lands or territories and other resources’ (Article 32). Such commitments are increasingly met with a growing capacity of many Indigenous governments to leverage strategic partnerships from the bottom up, driving their own strategic assessments, sometimes in collaboration with industry; and to exert pressure top-down using international levers and commitments to environmental protection.

Consider briefly two recent examples from Canada. In 2012, the Ktunaxa Nation Council and Teck Coal Ltd. formed multi-stakeholder initiative for assessing and managing the cumulative effects of mining, forestry, wildfire, residential development and other land uses in the Elk Valley of British Columbia – traditional territory of the Ktunaxa. Although initial discussions between the Ktunaxa and Teck were triggered by an approval condition for a coal mine expansion, the environmental management framework that emerged from the bottom-up was external to any formal IA requirement and based on recognition of the value of strategic assessment to informing sustainable land use decisions. In 2015, given the growing success of the initiative and the opportunity to link the assessment to regulatory decisions, leadership was transitioned to the provincial government and it became a key component of a province-wide cumulative effects management and decision support framework (FLNROD 2019).

In a second example, the Mikisew Cree First Nation, whose traditional territory includes Wood Buffalo National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the Peace-Athabasca Delta, leveraged an international obligation and successfully petitioned the UNESCO World Heritage Committee that the park be added to the List of World Heritage Sites in Danger (IEC 2018). The main concerns were because of the cumulative pressures of hydroelectric dams, oil sands and mining activities at the parks’ boundaries, and the growing threat of climate change. In response, the World Heritage Centre and International Union for the Conservation of Nature formally ‘requested’ that Canada, as a UNESCO member state, undertake a strategic assessment of development pressures on the park and implement a subsequent plan of action for protection of the region’s outstanding universal values (UNESCO 2015).

Both examples illustrate innovation in advancing strategic assessment beyond the compliance-based model, the growing capacity of Indigenous peoples to drive transformation from the bottom-up and top-down, and the perceived value of strategic assessment as a means to address complex regional, national and international environmental and social challenges.

Conclusion

Globally, increasing demands are being placed on IA to tackle some of society’s most complex environmental and social challenges – challenges that are well-beyond the scope of traditional project-based IA systems. This means a new role for strategic assessment to integrate policy solutions and inform decision actions that generate and enhance environmental and social values. How this innovation takes place, and its key drivers, will depend largely on the political, social and economic context in which IA operates. However, such innovation is likely to be sparked through creative governance solutions and partnerships, more so that internally through new IA tools, legislation or protocols.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.