Journal of Environmental Assessment Policy and Management

Sustainability is an essentially integrative concept. It seems reasonable, then, to design sustainability assessment as an essentially integrative process and framework for decision-making on undertakings that may have lasting effects.

The realm of sustainability has often been depicted as the intersection of social, economic and ecological interests and initiatives. Accordingly, many approaches to sustainability oriented assessments — at the project as well as strategic level — have begun by addressing the social, economic and ecological considerations separately and have then struggled with how to integrate the separate findings. The problem is exacerbated by the generally separate training of experts in the three fields, the habitual collection of data separately under the three categories and the common division of government mandates into separate social, economic and ecological bodies. The combined effect is not merely an absence of integrative expertise, data and authority but an entrenched tendency to neglect the interdependence of these factors. The three pillars or triple bottom line approach also appears to encourage an emphasis on balancing and making trade-offs, which may often be necessary but which should always be the last resort, not the assumed task, in sustainability assessment.

There are, however, important concerns underlying advocacy and application of some three pillar, limited integration approaches. Most significant are well-grounded fears that integrated, sustainability-based assessments may facilitate continued or even renewed neglect of traditionally under valued considerations, especially the protection of ecological systems and functions. This problem needs to be addressed thoughtfully in judgements about how integration is to be done.

One possible solution is to take sustainability as an essentially integrative concept and to design sustainability assessment more aggressively as an integrative process. This would entail a package of regime and process design features, centred on ones that.

• build sustainability assessment into a larger overall governance regime that is designed to respect interconnections among issues, objectives, actions and effects, though the full interrelated set of activities from broad agenda setting to results monitoring and response;.

• design assessment processes with an iterative conception-to-resurrection agenda, aiming to maximise multiple, reinforcing net benefits through selection, design and adaptive implementation of the most desirable option for every significant strategic or project level undertaking;.

• redefine the driving objectives and consequent evaluation and decision criteria to avoid the three conventional categories, to ensure attention to usually neglected sustainability requirements and to focus attention on the achievement of multiple, mutually reinforcing gains;.

• establish explicit basic rules that discourage trade-offs to the extent possible while guiding the decision-making on those that are unavoidable;.

• provide means of combining, specifying and complementing these generic criteria and trade-off rules with attention to case- and context-specific concerns, objectives, priorities and possibilities;.

• provide integrative, sustainability-centred guidance, methods and tools to help meet the key practical demands of assessment work, including identifying key cross-cutting issues and linkages among factors, judging the significance of predicted effects, and weighing overall options and implications; and.

• ensure that the decision-making process facilitates public scrutiny and encourages effective public participation.

The broadening out of environmental assessment to also consider social and economic dimensions poses some unique challenges, not the least of which is understanding exactly what such a process might entail. This paper outlines the spectrum of possibilities and explores the issue of when and how environmental, social and economic considerations can be integrated in sustainability assessment. The integration issue is also relevant to the practice of strategic environmental assessments (SEA). A new way of conceptualising these types of assessment is put forward based on: (i) what is being assessed — the "question" that is being asked; and (ii) what approach is being used — the type of assessment selected from the spectrum of possibilities. The latter ranges from impact minimisation for each of the three sustainability pillars through to sustainability considered as an integrated concept. The combination of the question and assessment approach determines the level, extent and timing of integration of environmental, social and economic considerations that can be achieved. Additional thought needs to be given to who is performing the integration role as well as the nature of a particular proposal or its setting. This approach to thinking about SEA and sustainability assessment is illustrated with examples from Australia and the United Kingdom.

In order for sustainability assessments to realise their full potential, there is a need for criteria against which sustainable development might be evaluated. In this article, we employ a principle-based theoretical approach to develop a framework of sustainable development criteria. From an analysis of the different views of the concept of sustainable development, we arrive at two main principles that might guide assessments for sustainable development: resilience and justice. These two principles are explored using the John Rawls's justice theory, and the ideas of C.S. Holling in relation to resilience. We also consider the value to the framework of the concept of efficiency. Finally, the paper concludes with a proposal for the application of this framework within sustainability assessment processes based upon Participatory Integrated Assessment.

Sustainability Assessment is a recent addition to the environmental assessment toolbox that is not currently applied in South Africa in any formal way. However, there appear to be remarkable similarities between what is commonly proposed as Sustainability Assessment and how Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) has been conceptualised and promoted in South Africa. This paper therefore investigates the following questions:.

• Could the South African concept and application of SEA be what is required for Sustainability Assessment?

• If Sustainability Assessment is "dressing up" SEA, is there really a need to introduce a new tool?

• If there is a need for a new tool, are there lessons learnt from the application of SEA in South Africa, which can be used to inform the further development and indeed practice of Sustainability Assessment?

This paper identifies from the literature some key criteria that should underpin Sustainability Assessment that are then used to identify some of the shortcomings of SEA, both as promoted and as practised in South Africa. Two sets of criteria form the basis of the analysis: one relating to sustainability assessment processes and the other to the concept of sustainability itself. As a result of this analysis, the paper makes recommendations as to how the practice of SEA in South Africa may be improved to better align with the principles of Sustainability Assessment. These recommendations are also likely to be relevant to other countries seeking to develop Sustainability Assessment processes based upon SEA. Finally, the potential for the emerging field of sustainability science as an underpinning body of knowledge is introduced.

The established approach to impact assessment is baseline-led, whereby the conditions that are likely to prevail in the absence of a proposed initiative are used as the "benchmarks" for determining the significance of impacts. Proponents of sustainable development (SD) criticise this approach for being directionless since it is based on extrapolating the past with no clear vision of what should be achieved in the future. Establishing objectives by which SD can be defined is one of the greatest challenges in the development of objectives-led assessment, especially since there is still so little consensus regarding exactly what SD entails. This paper explores a number of methods for establishing SD objectives based on a literature review and the analysis of case studies.

This paper seeks to contribute to the development of principles for effective sustainability assessment. Drawing upon three sustainability assessments of project proposals conducted recently in Western Australia, three important aspects of good process are identified: the "question" that guides the assessment process; the influence of the assessment process on the development of the final proposal; and the basis for sustainability decision-making. These three aspects are closely inter-related, and also influenced by and related to the prevailing policy context and institutional arrangements guiding the assessment. Recommendations are made for more effective sustainability assessment processes in Western Australia; and the ultimate contribution that effective sustainability assessments of project proposals could make to a more sustainable society is considered. The broader Western Australian political, cultural and social context within which the assessments have been conducted is described, in order to facilitate a deeper understanding of the issues discussed and therefore to maximise the potential for others to learn from these experiences.