EDIAIS : Conference papers

This paper focuses on the nature and purpose of Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA). Since the late 1980s, greater understanding of the difficulties in promoting sustainable development through existing policy processes, has led to the burdening of assessment with greater responsibilities. These are expressed in terms of the need to start early, to integrate processes, sectors and themes (social, economic and environmental), to assess alternatives, to improve the decision-making processes, and to widen the scope of tools to include more dialogical ones. They therefore affect the purpose and function of SEA, and its relationship with the planning and decision-making processes, which it applies to. Referring to the example of an SEA of the national programme for water resource management (2002) requested by the World Bank to the Chilean Ministry of Public Works, the paper shows the importance of defining a clear purpose for the assessment, and understanding the policy process being examined before shaping the assessment process itself. It reveals two distinct types of purpose for carrying out an SEA: 1) a modernist purpose which is linked to positivist and reductionist perspectives and relates to the specific initiative under scrutiny and the Bank procedural requirements for 'project approval', and 2) a transformative purpose which relies more on holistic perspectives and is concerned with the wider context in which the initiative is formulated. It is argued that the second purpose is implicit in the common statement that SEA is to promote sustainability, and signals a change in the concept of assessment itself. The systematic application of SEA to strategic initiatives within a given organisation can provide valuable information in terms of the obstacles to more sustainable policy processes; this learning can be translated into recommendations for change to the organisational context. Thus, the function of SEA becomes one of facilitating the transition to sustainable policy making, by strengthening the environmental capacity of the organisations responsible for development. The Chilean and World Bank SEA is an example of lost opportunities due to a narrow understanding of the strategic dimension of the initiative being assessed and failure to shape the assessment methodology to meet the more far-reaching purpose of SEA. However, its lessons contribute to the re-thinking of the role and functions of SEA within organisations responsible for development, such as ministries or international funding agencies.

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