Journal of Environmental Assessment Policy and Management

This paper documents the experience of teaching environmental impact assessment (EIA) to undergraduate students at Escola Politécnica, an engineering school in Brazil, where EIA was first introduced as a graduate course in 1990, evolving to be taught as an undergraduate course. Learning objectives, course contents and teaching approaches are described. The courses have always sought to prevent a "legal trap" in teaching EIA, i.e. shaping the contents and the approach upon the applicable legal requirements, as it is assumed that, ultimately, EIA is not practiced because of laws, but because society calls for environmentally and socially responsible decision-making. Given the limited literature on EIA education, the paper also hopes to stimulate further reflection and debate on the role of teaching in enhancing environmental assessment practice and in improving its effectiveness and disseminating best practices.

State mandates and guidelines significantly influence local land use planning; however few studies have been conducted to empirically detect the gaps in sustainable environmental planning between the state and local jurisdictions. This paper analyses the California Governor's Environmental Goals and Policy Report (EGPR) and 116 local comprehensive land use plans to develop a set of measurable indicators to detect gaps in local planning efforts to incorporate state goals and policies. Descriptive results indicate that the local jurisdictions reached approximately half of the state's sustainable environmental planning goals. The major gaps existed in some region-wide, global-wide, long-term, cumulative, and strategically critical environmental elements. Regression results further highlight the major factors that significantly influenced local jurisdictions' environmental planning abilities. Six policy recommendations are provided to reduce these gaps.

Several methods and ecological indicators are used in environmental economics to analyse the process of sustainable use of natural resources. These approaches are helpful in measuring and assessing the intensity (efficiency) of products' use and their impact on the environment. However, they do not sufficiently reflect the dynamics and improvements in the achieved outcomes as compared to the population (generation) growth. Moreover, they do not allow always analysing product changes on the world level. Referring to this existing gap, we conceptualise a new approach — product generational dematerialisation (PGD) indicator, measuring product efficiency and population changes in relative values, and use it for investigating the dematerialisation for the world energy sector in the last 35 years. The indicator can be used as a new methodical tool to support and evaluate sustainable management policies on the enterprise, regional, national, and international level as well as for different resources, goods, and services.

This paper outlines sustainable procurement policy, which aims to benefit society and the economy and minimise damage to the environment. It uses cost-benefit analysis to evaluate a variety of sustainable procurement policies (road construction, video conferencing, LED traffic lights, and utilising unemployed people). It shows under what conditions sustainable procurement is likely to benefit the economy and society. The paper also reveals the impact of project life, the discount rate, and the social price of carbon in determining the social profitability of some sustainable procurement policies. It reveals that the social profitability of projects is mixed, and suggests that sustainable development policy in the UK is running ahead of the evidence base.

Government agenda setting has been a focus of research in the field of policy sciences for over two decades. The concept of a policy window is explored as a driver of governmental agenda setting. The Regional Municipality of York, Ontario, Canada was chosen as a case study for exploring the application of strategic environmental assessment at the municipal level through a policy window lens. Problem, policy and political streams converged to provide the necessary conditions for improved environmental assessment and infrastructure planning in York Region. A focusing event and the resulting crisis motivated stakeholders to identify and act on the problem. An SEA-type approach was initiated as one key response. A variety of activities were initiated by York Region including the development of a Sustainability Strategy, synchronisation of master planning, wider consideration of alternatives at the master plan level and improved public consultation. Conclusions are drawn and several recommendations are presented and discussed.