Journal of Environmental Assessment Policy and Management

This article examines the ways in which Human Impact Assessment has been integrated into plans and programmes in Finland. The EIA Act requires that the impacts on humans should also be taken into account in assessment. The programmes reviewed have been selected from various sectors, including traffic, energy, forestry and land use. Some common features, strengths and development needs were revealed in the impact assessments. On the basis of this material, at least three procedural challenges to strategic impact assessment can be identified: the differentiation between impacts caused by the programme and other societal changes; the sufficient assessment of undesirable impacts; and the definition of concepts used in the programmes.

Considerable research has been undertaken on the quality of Environmental Impact Statements as an indicator, albeit superficial, of the effectiveness of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) practices. Yet there remains a paucity of empirical data on practices at the more detailed level (e.g., for the consideration of certain environmental components and stages of the EIA process), despite the importance of such analyses for the development of grounded measures for enhancing effectiveness. This study contributes to the development of a detailed empirical understanding of EIA practices by examining analyses of impacts upon the aquatic environment (Water Impact Assessment (WIA)) for a sample of 50 development proposals in England and Wales. The research results indicate that WIA practices have improved over time, but a significant proportion of assessments remain unsatisfactory, and the quality of core elements of WIA (e.g., the consideration of alternatives and impact prediction) is particularly problematic. It is suggested that changes made to the EU EIA legislation have not significantly affected WIA practices in England and Wales. However, practices are not as problematic as research indicates is the case for ecological, socio-economic and cumulative impact assessments. Further strengthening the legislative provisions for EIA would partially address a number of specific problems (e.g., inadequate scoping and provision for monitoring). Nevertheless, a comprehensive and concerted strategy for enhancing effectiveness will be required if WIA is fulfil its potential for contributing to the management maxim of sustainable development.

Malawi entered a formalisation of a decentralised administration structure through the enactment of the Local Government Act of 1998. The environmental implications and obligations are stated in the Environmental Management Act 1996, which also mandates the Environmental Affairs Department as the co-ordinator for environmental management. Both acts devolve environmental management responsibilities to the District Assemblies. Donors (i.e., UNDP and DANIDA) sponsored and facilitated environmental management decentralisation through projects that strengthened legal and institutional framework, and built capacity. A few of lessons have been learnt from the process, and some are outlined in this paper e.g. the need for capacity building, harmonisation of the major statutes, and institutions where to anchor the mainstreamed decentralised environmental management functions. Other lessons include lack of delineation between devolution and deconcentration leading to local participation apathy, different policies among donor agencies resulted in implementation difficulties, and uncertainty in continuity of the initiative e.g. closure of DANIDA activities resulted in almost halt to the decentralisation of environmental management.

Improved access to clean water is important in improving health, relieving drudgery for women, and in designing and implementing effective poverty alleviation strategies. However, few empirical studies have had the objective of establishing the link between community participation and management, and sustainability of community based water utility projects. In addition, there is no consensus on the analytical techniques to use for sustainability assessment. This paper uses data collected from community water utility projects in two regions in Central Tanzania to demonstrate the use of canonical correlation analysis in sustainability assessment. The advantage of canonical correlation analysis is that the results are invariant with respect to the basis in which the variables are transformed. In addition, the analytical technique leads itself to identifying what management issues need to be addressed at the project level, to improve both community participation and management, and hence sustainability of such types of projects.

Ecoefficiency is critical for organisations that seek to be both environmentally conscious and profitable. Ecoefficiency has implications for a "win-win" situation to arise. Studying and managing organisations from this perspective requires an evaluation of ecoefficiency. To aid researchers and managers develop measures for ecoefficiency we review the use of data envelopment analysis (DEA) for this purpose. DEA theory and application has increased greatly. Its use as a tool for environmental performance evaluation has been limited. In this paper we provide a number of DEA models and some extensions and how they can be utilised from both the practitioner and researcher perspective. An illustrative example from published data helps to gain insight into the various models, their capabilities and limitations.