Session Description
Social Impact Assessments are forward-looking instruments used to identify and manage the potential impacts of a new project. This definition is increasingly under scrutiny, as rising land pressures force projects into territories and landscapes with deeply embedded legacy issues, where historical projects or policies have left their mark on local communities. From broken promises to project-induced trauma, the role of the Social Impact Assessment is temporally complex: looking backwards in order to meaningful mitigate problems of the present.
While historical legacy has long been an integral part of stakeholder engagement processes, the potential for genuine, legacy-informed impact assessment and planning remains hampered by structural power imbalances, budget limitations and time pressures that often define the SIA process. Increasingly, however, major lenders are integrating historical legacy issues into their environmental and social frameworks, instructing projects to account for historical, unmitigated social harms. Retrospective impact assessments and trauma-informed impact assessments provide examples of how historical legacy can be integrated into SIA methodology.
This session seeks to explore how practitioners are using historical legacy as a formative aspect of SIAs to influence project design. The session invites papers that demonstrate how impact assessments work with and work through legacy issues tied to their projects. The objective of the session is to explore frameworks, methods of practice, and case studies that can ultimately demonstrate the productive value of historical legacy for both affected communities and project sustainability.
Session Summary
The session explores how impact assessments work with and through the historical and territorial legacy issues tied to their projects, exploring frameworks, methods of practice, and case study interventions that demonstrate the productive value of historical legacy for both affected communities and project sustainability.
Session Chair
Martin PRICE
Insuco
United Kingdom