https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1436-1221
Dear readers,
Welcome to the first issue of IAPA in 2022.
2021 was the fourth successive year where six issues of our journal were published over 12 months. The number of ‘source documents’ appearing on Scopus (https://www.scopus.com/source/eval.uri) per year has now stabilized at 57 for the second year running, after a rapid increase over the previous 3 years from around 30 documents being published in four issues p.a. up until 2017. It is fair to say that Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal (IAPA) is currently in a healthy state, not just concerning the number of quality impact assessment-related items published but also with regard to various other metrics, for example, our impact factor, which increased to 2.524 last year, up from 1.551 the year before.
All of this is important and clearly good news! However, as the editor-in-chief of IAPA whose second 3-year term will soon come to an end, I would like to add a word of caution, which is fed by some perturbing developments in the publishing world. There is currently very clearly an inflation of publication activity in various journals. Whilst per se this doesn’t need to be a problem, there are indications that this increase is associated with a loss of focus and relevance for the core discipline(s) journals are said to be catering for, and also arguably, with a loss of quality.
With regard to our journal, IAPA, I believe that, at this stage, we need to be cautious not to get carried away and put too much of an emphasis on increasing source documents and metrics, which would actually be a remarkably easy thing to do. Quite a few of the currently over 150 submissions a year to IAPA are rejected without review, not necessarily because they do not meet basic publishing standards, but because they are of no obvious interest for the impact assessment profession and therefore not suitable for publication in IAPA. In the current environment, it is clear that when attempting to chase quantitative ‘metrics of success’ it is all too easy to forget about other key ingredients of journal publishing, in particular the interests of target communities and associated quality.
Some publishers (admittedly mostly ‘rogue’) also seem to have their very own publishing goals and rules which – when it comes to the worst offenders – is reflected in their approach to editing, allowing ‘anyone’ to become a special issue editor. The direst case I have seen involves 100s of ‘special issues’ being worked on by 100s of ‘special issues editors’ in parallel. Whilst this model can still (occasionally) lead to a special issue which is of a good standard (reflecting the quality of the responsible special issue editor), the overall quality of articles published in connection with practices like this tends to be worryingly poor (notwithstanding claims of peer review). So, if you plan on publishing a paper, choose carefully who you publish with!
With regard to IAPA, we are lucky that our publisher ‘Taylor and Francis’ shares our concerns for focus and quality and we have every reason to be very grateful for this. At this stage, I would therefore like to express a big thank you to them and for their efforts to ensure quality and integrity. I would also like to express a plea to whoever will take over the position as editor-in-chief (and as a side note to any readers who have publishing and editing experience, please consider applying! You wil find further information here: https://www.iaia.org/news-details.php?ID=168) to stay focused on the needs of our community and on quality!
Subsequently, in this issue, you will find 7 papers by 16 authors, representing 5 countries. Topics covered include impact assessment in general and also with regard to teaching and higher education, social impact assessment (SIA), disaster risk assessment (DRA), health impact assessment (HIA) and environmental quality objectives.
In the first paper, ‘Next generation impact assessment: Exploring the key components’, John Sinclair, Meinhard Doelle and Robert Gibson (all from Canadian universities) ‘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 is followed by the three South African authors (all North West University) Leandri Kruger, Luke Sandham and Dewald van Kiekerk, who look at ‘SIA and DRA integration for increased resilience’. In the paper, they investigate ‘the integration of SIA and DRA for increased community resilience’. Next, Maria Raimundo e Almeida, Anne Malvestio and Fernanda Veronez (all from Brazilian universities) in ‘Teaching impact assessment: applying indicators of best practice principles to Brazil’ propose and apply ‘a framework of 14 indicators to analyse the content of IA teaching [, focusing] on Brazilian Environmental Engineering Programs’. In the fourth paper, Hanna Blåhed and Miguel San Sebastián (both from Umeå University, Sweden) report on the lessons learned from ‘Health impact assessment of a mining project in Swedish Sápmi’, suggesting that whilst ‘in Sweden health impacts are often [only] vaguely described in EIA […] it is possible to conduct a comprehensive HIA in the context of Sámi health research’. In another contribution from Sweden, Mikael Malmaeus and Erik Lindblom (both Swedish Environmental Research Institute) reflect on ‘Quantifying pressures from Swedish industries impacting Sweden’s Environmental Quality Objectives’. Importantly, they find ‘that industries and other permit requiring activities (PRA) exert a significant cumulative pressure on 20 out of 34 examined specifications to the Swedish Environmental Quality Objectives (EQO), affecting the fulfilment of 12 out of 16 of these EQOs’. The last two papers are from authors based at Groningen University in the Netherlands. First, in ‘Advancing beyond project-scale Social Impact Assessment of transport infrastructure: insights into contextual constraints on practice’, Lara Mottee aims at developing a better understanding of the ‘constraints to the assessment and management of social impacts [,] drawing on interviews with expert infrastructure professionals involved in projects in Sydney (Australia), Amsterdam (The Netherlands), and internationally’. Finally, in ‘Evaluating the effectiveness of a national environmental and social impact assessment system: lessons from Uganda‘, Pius Kahangirwe and Frank Vanclay elaborate on ‘the adequacy of the legislative and administrative provisions for environmental and social impact assessment (ESIA) in Uganda’.
Enjoy reading!