Forces for change in social impact assessment

ABSTRACT

Social impact assessment (SIA) is experiencing both evolutionary and revolutionary forces for change. Using the example of New South Wales, Australia, forces for change include community pressure and shifting expectations, industry desire for clarity and certainty, departmental leadership, a collaborative approach to policy development, and perceived legitimacy of the guideline itself. Inhibiting these forces are general resistance to change, a concern around costs of good SIA, unfamiliarity with social sciences, and insufficient practitioner capacity. The recent Rocky Hill judgement, which highlights concepts such as community cohesion, sense of place, and distributive equity, may accelerate change. However, there is also a need to build capacity among SIA practitioners, and afford sufficient time and budget to meet the standard of leading-practice guidelines. At the same time, unfolding trends such as the climate change and extinction crises, the gendered nature of development, ever-widening inequalities, and ‘post-truth’ discourses may catalyse more revolutionary change in SIA practice – changes that paradoxically may enable SIA to reclaim its social-science principles and the overarching goal of sustainable social development.

KEYWORDS:

• Social impact assessment
• planning
• social licence
• force fields
• wellbeing
• sense of place

Introduction

At the 2019 International Association for Impact Assessment conference in Brisbane, social impact assessment (SIA) was strongly represented in proceedings, with many speakers proposing both revolutionary and evolutionary possibilities for future directions that SIA could take. Several looked to the SIA guideline for New South Wales (NSW), Australia (NSW DPIE 2017), as representing a new benchmark for SIA at the institutional level. Indeed, the keynote address cited this guideline as ‘a significant step forward in terms of how “social impacts” are to be assessed and factored into decision making in NSW’ (Morris 2019). However, its influence in practice is not automatically bequeathed by its mere existence, but rather by the interplay of various forces.

The NSW SIA guideline, which applies only to resources projects (mining, quarries, and petroleum extraction), is the first of its kind in NSW. Legislation requires decision-makers to consider social impacts (New South Wales Government 1979), but does not provide any guidance to project applicants as to how to assess them. The guideline fills this gap by specifying expectations of applicants in undertaking SIA, and explaining how social impacts will be considered alongside environmental and other impacts. Options for extending the guideline to other sectors are currently being investigated (NSW DPIE 2017).

As someone responsible for much of the development and implementation of the guideline, I have observed countervailing forces influencing its uptake. Using this guideline as a case study to illuminate forces for change in SIA, below I discuss supporting and inhibiting forces in turn. To structure the analysis, I apply Kurt Lewin’s model of change and idea of ‘force fields’ (Lewin 1951; see also Schein 1996). Lewin views social situations as dynamic states in which change occurs when forces driving change outweigh forces inhibiting or resisting change. I then propose some social trends that may signify more revolutionary change. All of these forces are represented together in Table 1. While my discussion relates to the NSW context specifically, the forces and trends may be relevant in other contexts.

Table 1. Applying force-field analysis to change in SIA in the context of New South Wales.

Forces supporting change	Forces inhibiting change

Forces supporting (evolutionary) change

In general, forces driving uptake of the guideline reflect – and reinforce – changing social norms and expectations. In common with related discourses of corporate social responsibility (e.g. Bice 2015), social licence (e.g. Parsons and Moffat 2014a, 2014b; Luke 2017; Luke, Brueckner and Emmanouil 2018) and community engagement (e.g. Dare et al. 2014), SIA represents a shift towards a more human-centred or holistic approach to development. Forces within this shift, which is essentially evolutionary rather than revolutionary, are evident within communities, among industry, and at the institutional (government) level.

Community forces: pressure and shifting expectations

Recent years have seen development and its impacts in NSW intensify, especially from urban and infrastructure development in Sydney, and mining development in the Hunter Valley. This has brought inevitable social pressures as people live with ongoing changes to their surroundings and a sense that they are relatively powerless to influence the pace or direction of change (e.g. Askland 2018). Projects such as the WestConnex motorways, and industries such as coal-seam gas and coal mining, have encountered significant community resistance.

At the same time, community expectations of developers are always changing, in response to evolutions in the discourse of development itself. That is, the way we – as a society – both talk about and practise ‘development’ is constantly evolving. For instance, community engagement is now firmly at the centre of how we expect developers to practise development, and ‘social licence’ has become a common term to refer to the need for large organisations to seek and maintain community approval (e.g. Thomson and Boutilier 2011; Luke 2017; Luke, Brueckner and Emmanouil 2018; Parsons and Moffat 2014a). As a result, people are demanding that both government and private developers carefully consider how projects might affect their communities, before approval is granted or before project details are finalised. The NSW SIA guideline, in this context, can be seen as complementing and responding to pre-existing and evolving societal expectations.

Industry forces: desire for more clarity and certainty

If there is one thing that industry dislikes, it is regulatory uncertainty. In NSW, uncertainty had arisen from a lack of clarity on what the Department required in terms of SIA. Legislation required proponents to consider social impacts but did not specify how. Industry representatives such as the NSW Minerals Council had therefore expressed a desire for clear guidance. The guideline provides this greater clarity by specifying requirements and providing an assessment framework. In my experience, industry (with some reservations) has largely welcomed the guideline and many proponents have used it, including some outside the resources sector that are not formally required to do so.

Institutional forces

Leadership

The internal driving force behind the guideline was executive leadership; the Department¹ of Planning and Environment’s Secretary (the departmental head) identified SIA as an area in need of improvement. This was critical in raising the profile of SIA internally, and led to the creation of a new position of SIA Specialist (the author of this paper), later increased temporarily to two Specialists. Concurrently, the Department promoted a more community-oriented approach to planning, with greater emphasis on community engagement.

A collaborative approach to development and implementation

SIA, as articulated in international frameworks (e.g. Vanclay 2003; IFC 2012; Kvam 2018), is underpinned by strong ethical research principles such as inclusivity, methodological rigour, materiality (focusing on what matters most to those affected), and transparency. As such, the departmental team developing the guideline felt it important to practise these principles themselves. Compared with traditional, ‘top-down’ approaches to policy-making, the process of developing the guideline was relatively collaborative, using a range of forums to seek advice and insights from experts, from industry, from consultants, from interest groups, from other departmental teams, and from communities in mining-affected regions (Parsons et al. 2018).

As a result, the ‘institutionalisation’ of SIA in NSW, via the launch of the guideline, was not a surprise to anyone, and the final content incorporated many of the aspirations and (sometimes competing) interests of various stakeholders. Subsequently, many consultants have taken up invitations to discuss the provisions of the guideline and how it applies to their projects. Internally, the SIA team has worked closely with Assessment Officers to support them in learning a new discipline.

This collaborative approach has helped to diminish the risk of the guideline being perceived as superfluous ‘red tape’, while simultaneously conveying the impression that the Government genuinely respects community concerns and aspirations for sustainable and responsible development.

Perceived legitimacy of the guideline itself

Support from industry, departmental leadership, community pressure, and a collaborative approach are all important ingredients in driving change, but ultimately, they all need to be underpinned by a high-quality document. Although it leaves room for improvement (Parsons et al. 2018), the guideline has been widely praised for its comprehensiveness and usefulness. Importantly, it remains faithful to relevant SIA principles and frameworks (Vanclay 2003; Esteves et al. 2012; Vanclay et al. 2015), lending it credibility among practitioners.

Consultants and academics – the people mostly responsible for applying it – have welcomed the guideline as filling a much-needed gap in supporting professionalism and integrity in SIA, and as being consistent with what they consider to be leading practice. This endows it with legitimacy as a suitable framework and tool for rigorously assessing social impacts. Such legitimacy was further enhanced in the recent Rocky Hill judgement in the NSW Land and Environment Court, which closely followed the guideline to assess likely social impacts (Gloucester Resources Limited v Minister for Planning 2019 NSWLEC 7).

Forces inhibiting change

According to Lewin’s model, inhibiting forces are those that restrain change; social practices must be ‘unfrozen’, or ‘unlearned’, for change to be effective (Lewin 1951). For the NSW SIA guideline, inhibiting forces include general resistance to change, concern around costs, unfamiliarity with social sciences, and insufficient practitioner capacity.

Resistance to change

Notwithstanding the efforts made to collaborate with all stakeholders in developing and implementing the guideline, its introduction represents change, both for industry and for departmental officers. Change commonly meets with resistance as the status quo is being questioned (Schein 1996).

Among industry stakeholders, while most welcomed the guideline, some saw it as another expensive hurdle to jump through in order to gain project approval. When/if the guideline is extended to other sectors, more resistance may emerge from industries that are not accustomed to SIA, and from proponents that would prefer to avoid critical scrutiny. The risk here is the development of a minimalist, regulatory, compliance-driven approach in which the rationale for SIA is merely ‘a permitting hurdle’ (Harvey and Bice 2014) to create little more than ‘a perception that the developer cares about the people’ (Aucamp and Lombard 2018, p. 178).

Internally, the guideline also encountered resistance. Some assumed that social impacts were adequately considered as part of other environmental assessments and consequently saw no need for a distinct consideration of social impacts. This position reflects a technocratic view of SIA, where social impacts are defined in terms of tangible and measurable biophysical impacts such as noise and dust, which are indeed routinely assessed. It overlooks many of the key dimensions of SIA such as intangible and indirect impacts, a focus on how people actually experience impacts, and differences in how impacts are distributed. These dimensions feature in the guideline, helping to rectify technocratic misconceptualisations.

Pressures on assessment times

Another internal force inhibiting change has been pressure to reduce assessment timeframes, combined with the assumption that applying the SIA guideline will mean more work. Concurrent with the development of the guideline, the Department was working to halve assessment times for major projects.

For proponents, too, project timing and budgetary pressures mean that anything perceived to delay, and/or increase the cost of, project approval raises concerns. If the Department considers that a proponent has provided insufficient information on social (or any other) impacts to enable it to evaluate the merits of a proposal, it can require that proponent to undertake further assessment. Making such requests has indeed met with some resistance owing to the resultant delays and associated costs.

Unfamiliarity with social sciences

Related to the technocratic view is a conceptualisation of impact assessment broadly as a quantitative, objective enterprise. This dominant view assumes that likely impacts of a proposal can be quantitatively predicted, albeit with some level of uncertainty, and that the various impacts can be weighed against each other to reach an objective decision about the project’s desirability.

This objectivist view is problematic even for environmental and economic impacts because, although many can be quantified, they depend on a series of assumptions built into the modelling. Furthermore, ultimate decision-making relies upon value judgements regarding the relative significance of various matters such as biodiversity, groundwater levels, employment, and revenue. When this view is extended to social impacts, it becomes even more problematic, because SIA focuses uniquely on intangible concepts such as wellbeing, community cohesion, distributive equity, and perceptions of these things (NSW DPIE 2017).

This created a challenge internally for Assessment Officers trained in technical, biophysical sciences rather than social sciences. Even though they may genuinely respect community opinions, they may privilege biophysical ‘facts’ over subjective experiences. For a non-social scientist, it may be difficult to distinguish between a SIA report that applies social science well and one that applies inappropriate methodologies and relies on unsubstantiated assertions.

Insufficient practitioner capacity

Most SIAs are conducted by environmental impact assessment (EIA) consultancies, which are generally dominated by biophysical scientists and town planners. There are some, but very few, SIA professionals among EIA consultancies qualified and experienced to the level required by most SIA guidelines, and they tend to originate from highly diverse disciplinary backgrounds (Coakes 2019). Clearly, this lack of capacity, combined with an absence of a widely-accepted qualification for SIA specifically, inhibits change. However, practical measures exist for responding to this and other restraining forces.

Shifting the balance through evolutionary change

Resistance to change, and the technocratic view of SIA, can be countered – or, in Lewin’s terminology, ‘unfrozen’ – by referring to the Rocky Hill judgement in February 2019 (Gloucester Resources Limited v Minister for Planning 2019 NSWLEC 7). The judgement clearly identifies secondary social impacts that can flow from tangible amenity impacts such as noise and dust, and further identifies distinct social impacts that cannot be considered as part of any other technical assessment, such as community cohesion and character, sense of place, mental health and wellbeing, fears and aspirations, and distributive equity. This major decision provides significant ‘psychological safety’ (Schein 1996) in the validity of SIA as a practice and as a decision-making aid.

Concerns regarding SIA increasing assessment times and costs during a period of pressure to decrease them are difficult to assuage. High-quality SIA does take time, and adds cost, and we need to be honest about this. The view that SIA is essentially ‘a tick-box exercise to get project approval’ (Aucamp and Woodborne 2019, p. 1) misconstrues SIA practice and overlooks its value. One response may be to encourage earlier commencement of the SIA process. Another response is to point to evidence that failure to address the social impacts of development adequately, or a lack of social licence, may cost time and money in the longer term, owing to increased likelihood of community resistance (e.g. Jijelava and Vanclay 2018).

To address the discomfort of Assessment Officers with SIA concepts and methods, the Department has developed internal practice notes and other resources drawing on previous SIA studies and academic literature, has provided introductory training, and currently has one SIA Specialist to provide ongoing support. These arrangements can be regularly reviewed to ensure adequate capacity and expertise to support implementation.

To address the lack of professional capacity among consultancies, the Department’s SIA Specialists have been clearly explaining the level of qualifications and experience required, while encouraging participation in training. Nevertheless, there may be a lag between the new requirements being in force and consultancies acquiring the appropriate skills. This presents an opportunity for consultancies wishing to broaden their services, for current and emerging ‘boutique’ consultancies specialising in SIA, for educational institutions looking to make links between courses and careers, and for trained social scientists looking for relevant work.

The above suggestions essentially support evolutionary change in SIA, by gradually shifting the balance of countervailing forces. More generally, SIA will inevitably evolve alongside evolutions in other areas of impact assessment, and in response to changing social conditions and community expectations. Next, I suggest six ‘megatrends’ – significant shifts in conditions (e.g. Hajkowicz et al. 2012) – that might entail more revolutionary change in SIA practice.

Possible ‘revolutionary’ trends in SIA

Of course, the future is axiomatically uncertain, and speculation can look misguided very quickly. Here, therefore, I identify social trends happening today that seem likely to continue reshaping our lives over the medium-to-long term, and that extend their reach to many dimensions of contemporary society. Each one is potentially ‘revolutionary’ in the scale of change it represents, and therefore may engender a substantial shift in some aspect of SIA, potentially representing a powerful supporting force for change in Lewin’s model.

Climate and extinction crises

The interconnected crises of climate change and mass extinction, while ostensibly environmental concerns, clearly have substantial implications for human systems and community resilience, particularly in terms of health, livelihoods, and food security, with marginalised communities at highest risk of adverse consequences (IPCC 2018). Under the NSW planning framework (NSW DPIE 2019), prospective impacts of major projects on climate change, biodiversity, and other environmental matters must be considered and usually form the basis of dedicated assessment reports, or sections of an environmental impact statement. However, these are treated principally as technical or biophysical, not social, matters.

Yet the human and social implications of the climate and extinction crises are increasingly likely to resonate with key principles of SIA, such as intergenerational equity, distributive (intragenerational) equity, and the precautionary principle. On the basis that our decisions today make us accountable for our collective future (Bice 2019), people’s genuine fears for future generations (e.g. Adams 2019) and of approaching ‘planetary boundaries’ (Steffen et al. 2015) may become more relevant matters for consideration in SIA, particularly for energy-intensive projects. Furthermore, restricting SIA responses to project-level may be relatively ineffective in the context of broader changes that present much bigger threats to social wellbeing (Aucamp and Woodborne 2019).

In 2015, researchers found that, over the last century, the average rate of vertebrate species loss is up to 100 times higher than the background rate, suggesting that we have entered a ‘sixth mass extinction’ (Ceballos et al. 2015). Others view ‘extinction’ as too passive a term and prefer ‘first extermination event’ (McBrien 2019) to emphasise humanity’s active role. While much attention among extinction researchers has focused on animal species, recent research found that plants are becoming extinct at up to 350 times faster than the historical average (LeRoux et al. 2019). As well as being existential threats themselves, these losses of species and biodiversity may represent direct threats to human communities. Where project-affected communities experience effects of extinctions and climate change as material impacts on their way of life, wellbeing, surroundings, culture, and/or sense of place, the proper role of SIA is to articulate these experiences, especially where they affect vulnerable and marginalised communities.

Gendered nature of development

Leading SIA guidance includes a requirement to conduct a gender analysis, with a view to understanding the differing needs, interests, values, and aspirations of women and men in relation to a proposed development (Vanclay et al. 2015). While this requirement may depend on the scale and type of projects, large developments such as mining and infrastructure projects often bring a ‘masculinisation’ of the local community, changing social structures and norms, for example by increasing experiences of sexual harassment and a sense of vulnerability among female residents (Ziller 2019).

Recognition of the gender dimensions of mining developments, in particular, is not new. Ten years ago, Rio Tinto (2009) published a guide for integrating gender considerations in its work. More recently, Keenan and Kemp (2014) made the case for including gender analysis in SIA of mining projects. In practice, however, few SIAs critically interrogate gender dimensions of development, leaving this to the realm of feminist scholarly study (e.g. Lozeva and Marinova 2010).

Broader social trends, however, may trigger more revolutionary change. The MeToo movement, despite its individualist origins, has arguably renewed feminism’s collective spirit and solidarity among women in opposition to patriarchal structures (Donegan 2018). SIA might soon be considering gendered impacts more commonly. At the same time, given the parallel increase in attention on non-binary gender identities, simplistic distinctions between impacts on women and men may need to be reconsidered to account for the nuanced ways in which individuals experience phenomena such as masculinisation.

Inequality and distribution of impacts

Impacts of projects, both positive and negative, tend to be unevenly distributed (Vanclay et al. 2015, p.1), potentially exacerbating unequal power structures. The NSW SIA guideline, in common with other leading guidelines, requires a disaggregated approach that identifies heterogeneous groups within affected communities and considers how they might experience the project differently, with particular attention on vulnerable and marginalised groups. In all projects, some people benefit, others lose, and some may experience both benefits and losses. Furthermore, impacts and benefits may shift over time. This level of complexity is rarely analysed in detail. Indeed, any attempt to do so comprehensively probably would result in vast reports that no one reads.

Nevertheless, the evidence is that economic inequalities are increasing (e.g. Piketty 2013; IMF 2017; Australian Government Productivity Commission 2018), and that these inequalities are associated with various social problems such as societal dysfunction, poor physical and mental health, obesity, drug abuse, and violent crime (Wilkinson and Pickett 2010). Inequality is also associated with power imbalances that can cause social unrest and exclusion (Aucamp and Lombard 2018).

In this context, SIA provides opportunities for interventions that stall or reverse this trend. Applying the SIA principle that ‘The goal of all projects should be sustainable social development’ (Vanclay et al. 2015, p.11), SIA offers an appropriate framework for examining whether a project is likely to reduce or exacerbate inequalities, notwithstanding that any project may involve losses for some individuals. In practice, this could mean assessing whether projects will make positive contributions to both the region and the local community, avoiding unnecessary trade-offs.

Reclaiming social science in a ‘post-truth’ era

In my own experience among departmental staff, I commonly hear SIA being misunderstood on the basis that it is ‘just about perceptions and emotions’, presumably as opposed to biophysical ‘facts’. More empathically, some genuinely want to find ways to incorporate subjective experiences into impact assessment, but suspect that such testimonies will be given little weight in the ‘objective’ act of decision-making. We might call this the epistemological challenge of SIA. The assumption is that other forms of impact assessment deal only with objective truths, whereas SIA trudges in the murky relativist waters of contested opinions. This overlooks the implicit assumptions that underpin any modelling, and the uncertainties inherent in any predictions.

Compounding matters, scientific evidence is increasingly challenged by a distrust of experts, perpetuated by discourses of ‘post-truth’ and ‘fake news’. These concepts may have their origin in Arendt’s (1971) notion of ‘defactualisation’, in which distinctions between scientific fact and fantasy disappear, enabling self-deception and disregard for reality. Superficially, one might think that distrust in the scientific method could favour SIA by promoting a kind of postmodern focus on disparate subjectivities. In practice, however, those who dismiss experts seem more likely also to dismiss the professional practice of SIA as another example of an ‘expert elite’ trying to impose ideological truth claims.

An evolutionary response may not suffice here. Some reflexivity is warranted, challenging our implicit assumptions. Much SIA practice perhaps tries too hard to look and feel like environmental impact assessment, with its discourse of quantification, technical precision, risk, mitigation, and management. Indeed, a misplaced pursuit of ‘objective knowledge’ would make SIA guilty of ‘physics envy’ (Van Maanen 1995, p. 134), instead of valuing its unique epistemological and methodological contribution. Quantification is useful and necessary for things that genuinely can be measured, but for other aspects of human and social experience it conveys only an illusion of objectivity. SIA is different because it concerns people, with their heterogeneous world views, values, opinions, and subjectivities. This requires critical analysis and advanced social-science skills.

In 2012, a landmark paper in this journal proposed that SIA needed to revisit its core concepts of ‘culture, community, power, human rights, gender, justice, place, resilience, and sustainable livelihoods’ (Esteves et al. 2012). This sounds strangely revolutionary even today, yet is eminently achievable through sound social science.

The above examples are just four potential ‘revolutionary’ trends for SIA derived from my own limited experience, and many others are possible. For example, if automation of industrial tasks increasingly reduces the employment intensity of large mining and construction projects (Wisskirchen et al. 2017; Autor and Salomans 2018), citing job creation as the only or overriding social benefit or mitigation measure of such projects (Aucamp and Lombard 2018) may no longer suffice. This could catalyse much closer attention to the specifically social dimensions of positive impacts, such as the psychosocial and wellbeing effects of employment. More broadly, Bice (2019) identifies the need for a shift to more cumulative (rather than project-by-project) impact assessment in response to our increasingly interconnected world, and to community-based assessments that attend conscientiously to how communities experience those cumulative effects.

Conclusion

The NSW SIA guideline is revolutionary in being the first of its kind, but evolutionary in essentially following existing international principles and frameworks. However, such evolution in practice is not automatically bestowed by the guideline’s mere existence. At this evolutionary level, countervailing forces support and inhibit change. Supporting change are pressures from communities experiencing rapid development, desires from industry for clarity and regulatory certainty, and institutional forces from government impetus. Inhibiting change are forces of resistance to change, pressures to reduce assessment timeframes, unfamiliarity with social sciences, and insufficient practitioner capacity.

The balance of these countervailing forces may be shifted by referring to the landmark Rocky Hill judgement, which highlights the relevance of commonly underassessed concepts such as community cohesion, sense of place, and distributive equity. Equally, any jurisdiction seeking to shift this balance will need to build capacity among SIA practitioners over time, and must allow sufficient time and budget for the quality of professional practice that is standard for other aspects of impact assessment.

At the same time, broader social trends may merit a more ‘revolutionary’ turn for SIA. The climate change and extinction crises, the reawakening of feminism through the MeToo movement, the inexorable widening of inequalities, and the contemporary distrust of science, all pose substantial challenges for impact assessment generally because they inherently subvert the normal ways of doing things. For SIA, however, perhaps they offer a profound opportunity to reclaim core principles and conscientiously work for equality, inclusion, social wellbeing, and sustainable social development (Vanclay et al. 2015; Aucamp and Lombard 2018).

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank colleagues at the IAIA19 conference in Brisbane for their constructive and collegial discussion on many of the matters raised in this article, and the anonymous peer reviewers for their constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Now the Department of Planning, Industry and Environment.