Demonstrating the benefits of impact assessment for proponents
Date
2015Author
Morrison-Saunders, Angus
Bond, Alan
Pope, Jenny
Retief, Francois
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
This paper is a call for more studies that explicitly demonstrate the benefits of impact assessment to proponents. While the
community of impact assessment practitioners generally believe that impact assessment is beneficial (to all stakeholders),
empirical demonstration of this, particularly to project proponents, is warranted, and especially in financial terms. While
many impact assessment benefits are intangible in nature, learning from the business and management literature shows how
such benefits can usefully be measured based upon perceptions of managers within proponent agencies in tandem with
archival material. A framework of the nature of impact assessment benefits for proponents, and their relative tangibility, is
presented along with a five-step methodology for determining benefits. We now call upon impact assessment researchers
and practitioners alike to use this framework and methodology to structure investigations from practice that will contribute
to an empirical database for demonstrating the benefits of impact assessment to proponents
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10394/18857https://doi.org/10.1080/14615517.2014.981049
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14615517.2014.981049