Social Impact Assessment (SIA): Key Points

Social Impact Assessment (SIA): Key Points Some unintended or intended actions have a direct impact on human communities and can bring desired or undesired changes. Social impact assessment (SIA) is a process of understanding this change.

The primary purpose of SIA is to come up with a more sustainable human environment.

Impact assessment serves many purposes and goals: • It intends to ensure a more economically, ecologically and socio-culturally sustainable environment that is equitable. Hence, impact assessment is believed to promote community development and empowerment, develop social capital in the form of social networks and trust, and build capacity. • The primary matter of concern with SIA is a positive attitude towards development for better development outcomes. It is never just the identification or improvement of unintended or negative outcomes. In this sense, it is more important to assist communities and other stakeholders to

identify real development goals, and ensure maximum positive outcomes, than minimizing the outcomes of negative impacts.

• A wide range of planned interventions can benefit from the various steps of SIA. And these steps can be adopted by a wide range of actors, even beyond a regulatory framework.

• SIA practices accept that the economical, social, and biophysical impacts are interconnected. Changes in any domain will lead to changes in the other domains. Therefore, SIA must begin with the understanding of impact pathways that develop when changes in any of the domain occur and that can cause changes across other domains. Additionally, it must also consider the consequences of changes within each domain. Simply put, it should consider cumulative effect of higher level impacts.

• The discipline of SIA should begin with the impact analysis of the past events.

SIA must consider its theoretical bases and be reflective of its practices.

• Typically, SIA applies to planned interventions, however, various techniques of SIA can also be applied to consider the impacts from various other types of events such as epidemics, disasters, demographic disasters, etc.

• SIA has a major role to play when it comes to the adaptive management of policies, plans, and programs. Therefore, it must be included during the design and operation of the planned intervention.

• As it is important to study impact, SIA builds on local knowledge. Plus, it follows a participatory process to study the concerns of interested and affected parties. It also involves stakeholders in the assessment of social impacts, monitoring of the planned interventions, and the analysis of alternatives.

Third party agencies can provide social impact assessment and compliance monitoring.

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