History: Sia Cannot Be Conducted Without Local Participation

SIA cannot be conducted without Local Participation

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Introduction

Community involvement in large projects set to affect all the stakeholders in a society is an inevitable aspect for any public or private organisation aspiring to initiate and run large projects seamlessly. In this study, the use of Social Impact Assessment (SIA) has been explored to show the importance of local participation in ensuring success for the projects that have direct or indirect influence to the society. An instance of functionality attributes in the engagement of local participation for the proper application and utilization of SIA has been explored in this study. Majorly basing the argument on Australia, the idea of engaging local participation is proved as inevitable in any commencement and running of large projects.

Local Participation as the Foundation for SIA

As explored by Franks, the main focus for the SIA is to create critical process of identifying, avoiding, mitigating, as well as enhancing the development outcomes with respect to the possible social issues denotable from the local community . SIA remains within the idea of ensuring comprehension of the fundamental social issues and respond to them by choosing the most effective development processes to benefit all stakeholders. SIA is critical process that play critical role on ensuring possible inter-societal disruptions are mitigated; Drysdale offers a proper reason for the need of local participation. Drysdale argues, “Some countries that are dependent on revenue from natural resources are often hampered in their pursuit of sustainable development due to weak formal institutions and governance” . Franks adds that the reason for applying SIA to examine the basic community-based attributes as a way to form a proper gateway for collective development is because social impact is a reality that is felt or experienced by an economic unit, social group, or even at an individual level. The impact of any development forms certain effect to the mentioned individuals, economic unit, or social group, and therefore it is inevitable to eliminate their participation when conducting SIA .

As argued by Lockie, Franetovich, Sharma, and Rolfe, predominant goals for the participation of local public in the SIA is mostly considered for proper understanding of the perception of the community concerning activity, resolving possible conflicts and reach consensus on the activity of project . Some of the other critical goals for engaging public participation in project development through the SIA may involve demonstration of transparency and accountability. For instance, Brandao states that Belun is one of the organisations in Timor-Leste to have empowered communities through aiding in preventing community conflicts, engaging capacity development in the community, and researching for proper policy development that engages community as a whole . There are factors that enable the effectiveness of public participation towards attaining these main goals.

One of the factors is the search for substantial involvement of public within its possible diversities possible, including the ones who are not within any organised interest groups as well as the ones who may not be willing to seek out information regarding the project proposal. Another factor involves making sure that the affected publics acquire the capacity and opportunity to involve themselves genuinely based on their indirect or direct influence on the outcomes of decision-making processes and general impact assessment . Another factor influencing the public participation effectiveness includes the provision of opportunities to engage into the project or activity while it is in its initial or proposal stage, and ensuring proper involvement throughout the continued progressions in the life cycle of the subsequent project. Moreover, the techniques for community participation can as well be for the purpose of pursuing more instrumental goals that may include securing public support on change proposal conducting dissent marginalisation from those proving to be minority groups, tapping local knowledge, or creating a diversion from other projects.

A good example is denotable from the Health Impact Assessments for capacity building project, under Lower Hunter Regional project, that saw cooperation of the Centre for Health Equity Training, Research and Evaluation (CHETRE) and the Department of Health in New South Wales (NSW) . Australia has set critical assertions of making the nation one of the best in giving health care services, in this case, the capacity building project led to the two organisations setting the first phase as a consultation phase with all relevant socially motivated organisations or individuals. The Department of Health in NSW and CHETRE engaged the consultation with key stakeholders in the Department of Health, Area Health Service Staff workshops in NSW. Development of newsletters and publications for Health Impact Assessment was also a major assessment activity practiced by the originations to ensure that the every stakeholder in the influenced society has participated in procession of the set capacity building project.

Considering the fact that some jurisdictions may exercise stipulation of limited compulsory legal conditions concerning any societal-based consultation for commencing or continuing projects, the public participation through the SIA has proved to offer great opportunities for the best community-based developments to take place . Public participation may act as a path to source opportunities and information that may enlighten the proponents to either go on with project proposed, amend any of the or reject it from even being started.

In the process of proponents developing inclusive stake holder engagement in the application of SIA, cooperation mechanisms are inevitable in the project life cycle. Department of State Development, Infrastructure and Planning in the State of Queensland had a report implicating that the engagement processes plays critical role in incorporating all relevant parties in order to enable seamless development of the general projects . In this case, the societal stakeholders will as well require conviction that the applied projects are genuine and benefits to all whereby the evaluation of the project progressions assures the society affected on the possibilities of these development attributes. Wells et al. argued that the evaluation process aligns critical reality regarding the effectiveness capacity upon which a project