Social Impact Assessment

Social Impact Assessments (SIA’s) are often conducted as a part of a larger environmental impact assessment, involving multi-disciplinary teams which focus on a variety of specialised components for the development project, incorporating three basic purposes:

- as a sub-field of an environmental impact assessment, SIAs investigate the 'social environment' in order to enhance the information/data concerning the 'natural environment';
- in collaboration with EIA specialists and engineers, SIAs provide a mechanism through which socio-economic, environmental and natural resource issues can be investigated from the ‘people angle’;
- as part of an infrastructural development project, SIAs provide a mechanism through which community participation activities can begin bringing people into the development process.

SIAPAC’s involvement can occur at the pre-feasibility, feasibility, detailed design and implement phases of the infrastructural projects and can include resettlement planning, the establishment and implementation of monitoring systems (with community representative bodies and the client) and outlining mitigatory measurement.

The SIA strategies practiced by SIAPAC are consistent with international lending institution policies regarding timing, activities and levels of effort and are conducted according to what are termed “best practices.” All SIA’s are specifically tailored and scaled to the needs of the client. Often various components of applied research and community facilitation strategies are used at relevant strategic points of SIA’s.