ideas and resources for the responsibility advocate

Last week, I participated in a panel discussion entitled “Streamlining Impact Assessment in an era of global uncertainty” at the International Association for Impact Assessment‘s annual conference, which was held in Québec City. What follows are my introductory remarks to that panel discussion.

When it comes to impact assessment generally and streamlining in particular, my mantra is simply this:  Better. Faster. Together.  

What do I mean by “Better”? There are many aspects of “better” that are relevant to impact assessment practice and process.  For instance:

We must do better at identifying and focusing our assessment on those things that really matter.  

We must do better at ensuring Indigenous rights and interests are meaningfully addressed.

We must do better at integrating project-level assessment with broader, regional mechanisms to manage cumulative effects.

We must do better at building on the body of knowledge developed through years of study.

We must do better at clearly communicating the results of our assessment.

And so on.

But we must also do all of these things Faster.

If we here in Canada are to build a robust, resilient economy that supports all Canadians in the face of ongoing geopolitical and environmental uncertainty, we must be able to get good projects going sooner.  We cannot afford to take five years or a decade or more to put people to work, to get shovels in the ground, to create value from and for our natural and human resources.  

The most common concern I hear about doing impact assessment faster is that it will come at the cost of people, of communities, and the environment.  And that must not be.

We cannot achieve Faster without also doing Better.  That is, we cannot build and maintain trust in a Faster process if people perceive it to be worse, in any of the aspects of quality and effectiveness that I mentioned and many others.

So, we need to do impact assessment both Better and Faster.

But we cannot achieve Better AND Faster unless we pursue them TOGETHER.

And in that regard, I mean that the solutions to the problems in impact assessment must be both systemic AND inclusive.  

Drawing, for example, on the latest suite of streamlining proposals put forth by our federal government here in Canada, you cannot make an agency responsible for impact assessment without also ensuring that agency has the capacity and the expertise to fulfil that responsibility effectively.  So – systemic.  

Yet capacity and expertise need not reside exclusively within that agency; there is significant capacity and expertise in academia, in Indigenous groups, in the practitioner community, across various levels of government, which can be brought to bear if we adopt more collaborative approaches.  So – inclusive.

I strongly believe that impact assessment frameworks and other regulatory review processes urgently need to be retooled to develop and apply more timely and efficient ways to evaluate and implement projects, drawing on our collective knowledge and experience in assessment – and especially management – of the environmental, social, cultural, health, and economic impacts.  

There is a tremendous breadth and depth of practical experience in Canada and elsewhere in this regard.  We need to leverage this expertise to collaboratively develop trusted, efficient, and expedited decision-making processes that respect and achieve both our local and global social and environmental goals.

To be absolutely clear, improving impact assessment and regulatory review processes to make them more efficient does NOT mean we have to sacrifice meaningful Indigenous and public participation or other vital advances made in IA practice in recent years.  

But we can – and must – do Better. Faster. Together.