Next generation impact assessment: Exploring the key components

ABSTRACT

The world now has decades of experience with impact assessment and most assessment regimes have undergone revision over time. A positive consequence of the debates about these revisions is a rich base of experiential evidence about IA successes and failures, apparent core requirements, best practices and promising innovations. We have been working with the concept of next-generation assessment and associated frameworks for a number of years now and feel that there is a package of essential elements that represent a consolidation of lessons from experience. Here, we present a package of 14 essential elements of next-generation assessment that could serve as a set of globally applicable generic components and a working framework of criteria to inform assessment improvement efforts anywhere. This iteration of the essential elements is based on input from an international audience of IA practitioners, proponents, government representatives, and participants. We conclude that implementation of many of the elements in ways suitably tailored for different jurisdictions would result in an important evolution of assessment toward next-generation approaches.

KEYWORDS:

• IA regime design and processes
• IA evolution
• policy modification
• next generation

Acknowledgments

The authors greatly appreciated the time and energy that participants put into our “scrawl on the wall” theme forum session at IAIA. We also want to acknowledge the assistance that Megan Poole provided with data transcription. Our paper has of course been improved through the comments provided by reviewers and we thank them for their effort.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [435-2017-0284 435-2017-0389]. There were actually 3 different SSHRC projects. The one listed and: 435-2017-0284; 435-2017-0389.