Journal of Environmental Assessment Policy and Management

Successive global conferences on sustainable development, such as the 1992 Earth Summit, have called for environmental and economic activities to be planned at the same time and in the same institutions, without elucidating how this should be done. This literature review provides a conceptual framework for organising the various approaches to integrated economic and environmental planning, along with supporting tools and techniques. The conceptual framework derived from this analysis illustrates the importance of vertical linkages among planning levels and highlights the paucity of integrated economic and environmental plans at the subnational level in Asia. Both of these issues need to be addressed if a nested hierarchy of integrated economic and environmental plans is expected to contribute to the achievement of sustainable development.

Throughout Asia, there is a commitment by governments to sustainable development, yet economic development continues to degrade the natural resources of the region and pollute the environment in both urban and rural areas. Current thinking about sustainable development suggests that planners and development specialists should attempt to integrate social, economic and environmental dimensions at all planning levels. This paper examines work undertaken by the Asian Development Bank over the last 15 years in the area of subnational integrated economic-cum-environmental (E-c-E) planning. It evaluates five subnational E-c-E plans against a model developed by the Organization of American States (OAS). The study found that the Asian case studies (and six earlier Latin American case studies) often have common failings. Improvement of the E-c-E planning approach, building on the common success factors and improving on the common weaknesses, is proposed. An improved E-c-E planning approach at all levels may be pivotal in contributing to sustainable development.

Since 1992, the Philippines has employed an innovative requirement to demonstrate social acceptability in project planning as a means through which public participation can be established. This paper discusses the participatory mechanisms used and evaluates the effectiveness of public participation in three case studies from key development sectors. In doing so, the existing conceptual frameworks for evaluating public participation are further developed through insights to community empowerment and sustainability in particular. Whilst increased public participation has resulted in improvements in the EIA process and environmental decision making in the Philippines, the evaluation of the case studies also reveals substantial issues of conflict within the communities and of the representation of diverse local interests at core stages in the planning process.

Impact Assessment (AI) is getting over its "teething problems" of the early 1990s, and is now trying to define, consolidate and spread best practice. It has been suggested that computer technologies like Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and/or decision-support tools like Expert Systems (ES) can play an important part in this process, and in a series of two articles we critically review these technologies, their use and their potential — and drawbacks — for IA. This first article is devoted to GIS, powerful packages that can handle spatial information quite efficiently in map form, but whose analytical capabilities are rather limited and would benefit from being articulated with other tools to make their use more friendly and efficient. The proposition underlying these articles is that these three areas (IA, GIS and ES), if properly organised, are potentially complementary and there can be mutual benefits if they are brought together. We concentrate on GIS first, ES will be discussed in the next paper.

This paper and another one preceding it investigate the potential of computer technologies like Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Expert Systems (ES) to help with Impact Assessment (IA), suggesting that one way to optimise the effectiveness of GIS is to embed these systems in a more user-friendly environment. This paper explores the experience and potential of ES to provide such decision support environment, extending the argument further into the realm of Decision Support Systems (DSS). The proposition behind this paper is that these areas (IA, GIS, ES and maybe DSS) are potentially complementary and there can be mutual benefits if they are brought together. Certain tasks in IA — like screening, scoping, or statement review — already have potential for substantial automation, as an opportunity for technology transfer within organisations involved with IA, so that relatively scarce experts can be freed up for more difficult jobs while less expert staff are promoted to answer more sophisticated questions like these. More technical tasks like impact and environmental prediction also show scope for some degree of modelling-based automation, while other less routinised and more open-ended tasks involved with the management of the whole IA process probably lend themselves better to automation of a different kind, which works more as an "aid" than a substitute for the expert, for which the more flexible DSS seem more appropriate.