Transcript Evaluating the Social Impacts of Change in a Sustainable Future Professor Ronald McQuaid Employment Research Institute Napier University Edinburgh, Scotland WASD conference, Brighton 27-29 August 2008

Evaluating the Social Impacts of
Change in a Sustainable Future
Professor Ronald McQuaid
Employment Research Institute
Napier University
Edinburgh, Scotland
WASD conference, Brighton
27-29 August 2008
Sustainable Development
• Three Pillars of Sustainability
– Environmental
– Economic
– Social
Environmental and Economic
Sustainability
Environmental – Well established but areas of
disagreement
Economic - Reasonably well developed, but still very
general and not exact:
e.g.
Cost Benefit Analysis
Project Appraisal
Private v Social costs, discount rates, weak
substitutability etc. Concerned often with economic
growth
Sustainability indicators have predominantly
focused on environmental issues and small scale
Overview
• What is Social Sustainability?
• Why is there interest in SSD?
- EU policy context
• Developing and measuring SSD
Social Sustainability
• No agreed definition: a society that has social
justice, is persistent and thrives …..
• “Development (and/or growth) that is compatible
with harmonious evolution of civil society,
fostering an environment conductive to the
compatible cohabitation of culturally and socially
diverse groups while at the same time
encouraging social integration, with
improvements in the quality of life for all
segments of the population.”
Polese and Stren (2000, 15-16)
Social Sustainability
• Some characteristics and issues:
– Quality of life issues
– Equality and social justice
– Fair distribution of benefits and costs
– Access to social resources to allow them to
participate fully in society
– Individuals have opportunity to reach full
potential and overcome disadvantage
– Promotes diversity while being inclusive
Social Sustainability (cont.)
– Promotes good governance
– Multi-generational timescale
– Primarily implemented and measured at the
local community level
– Importantly it is multi-dimensional (difficult/
impossible to get a single measure such as
monetarisation measure)
SSD is about:
– Social impacts of SD policies
– Social input and involvement
i.e. SIA is not just the inclusion of the social
impacts of Sustainable Development policies
It is also about how policies are developed and
implemented and who influences these
European Union Policy
Background 1
• Background : UN Agenda 21
• The Lisbon Strategy (introduces social
dimension, especially related to work)
2000 (re-launched 2005)
• Gothenburg Strategy 2001
Lisbon Strategy pillars (2000/5):
• An economic pillar preparing the ground for the
transition to a competitive, dynamic, knowledge-based
economy. Emphasis is placed on the need to adapt
constantly to changes in the information society and to
boost research and development.
• A social pillar designed to modernise the European
social model by investing in human resources and
combating social exclusion. The Member States are
expected to invest in education and training, and to
conduct an active policy for employment, making it
easier to move to a knowledge economy.
• An environmental pillar, added at the Gothenburg
European Council meeting, which draws attention to the
fact that economic growth must be decoupled from the
use of natural resources.
European Union Policy
Background 2
European Union Sustainable Development
Strategy 2006
•
•
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•
•
•
•
Climate change and clean energy
Sustainable transport
Sustainable consumption & production
Conservation and management of natural resources
Public Health
Social inclusion, demography and migration
Global poverty and sustainable development challenges
Sustainable Development Strategy Para 56 (2007)
• Sustainable development is a fundamental
objective of the European Union…It
agrees that the objectives and priorities
under the seven key challenges …
• The strategy uses a baseline of statistics for the
year 2000 against which to measure progress
and Eurostat produces monitoring reports
European Union Policy
Background 3
• Social Agenda 2005-2010
The EU's goals include sustained economic growth,
more and better jobs and greater social cohesion.
Balance with SDS?
• European Employment Strategy (first in
1997) and the Luxembourg Process
“open method of co-ordination” - multi-lateral
surveillance, based on annual reporting and comparable
monitoring indicators, so best performers in the EU
identified and learned from, plus improved exchanges of
information between Member States
Developing and measuring SSD
• Governance
(public participation, social inclusion, and public attitudes)
• Employment (at the local community level)
• Community Development
(local social benefits derived from community participation in
commercial activities and policy)
• Health and Well-being
(physical health & emotional sense of enjoying and achieving in life)
• Culture and Heritage
Impact Categories/Issues (cont.)
Cross-cutting all issues:
 distribution of social benefits
and costs
 participation of affected people in
decisions
 equality
 social justice
Governance
(public participation, social inclusion, and public attitudes)
Questions include, how does the policy:
• impact on the involvement of groups and
stakeholders to participate in governance?
• impact on social institutions or public institutions
and administrations in their ability and
responsibilities to governance?
• impact on a group or the individual’s access to
the legal justice system?
• impact on the public being informed about
issues within their community?
• impact on the privacy of individuals and
households?
Modelling Social Impacts
• EU (2006) Report identified 27 different
methodologies and techniques
• Identify the social impacts of a policy, who
is affected and the timescale
– Causal Model
– Qualitative Assessment
– Impact Matrix
– Measuring factors such as wellbeing?
Modelling Social Impacts 2
• Many sustainability assessments take a
‘triple bottom line’ – start with environment
and add on economic and social impacts
• Problem - perceives three as
independent from each other (gains or
losses from each can be exchanged to
achieve the optimal policy). Falls short of
the holistic approach of multi-dimensional
policy assessment
Balance Sheet Approach
• There is no common matrix by which all
social impact issues can be measured!
– History of ignoring issues that could not be
quantified numerically or monetarised
List all benefits/gains v. all costs/losses
– Consider distributional effects, equality and
social justice
– Weighting of measures
Indicators e.g. Rio Earth Summit 1992
indicators, Colantonio (2007) etc.
Social
1. Access to resources
2. Community needs ( e.g. are communities able to articulate their
needs?)
3. Conflicts mitigation
4. Cultural promotion
5. Education
6. Elderly and aging
7. Enabling knowledge management (including access to E-knowledge)
8. Freedom
9. Gender equity
10. Happiness
11. Health
12. Identity of the community/civic pride
13. Image transformation and neighbourhood perceptions
Indicators
Social cont.
14. Integration of newcomers (especially foreign in-migrants) and
residents
15. Leadership
16. Justice and equality
17. Leisure and sport facilities
18. Less able people
19. Population change
20. Poverty eradication
21. Quality of Life
22. Security and Crime
23. Skills development
24. Social diversity and multiculturalism
25. Well being
Indicators
Socio-Institutional
26. Capacity Building
27. Participation and empowerment
28. Trust, voluntary organisations and local networks (also know as Social
Capital)
Socio-economic
29. Economic security
30. Employment
31. Informal activities/economy
32. Partnership and collaboration
Socio-environmental
33. Inclusive design
34. Infrastructures
35. Environmental Health
36. Housing (quality and tenure mix)
37. Transport
38. Spatial/environmental inequalities
Indicators - criticisms
For example:
•
•
•
•
•
Difficult to measure indicators
Time horizon
Counterfactual – did it make a difference?
Combined effects of lots of indicators Σ>parts
Context is important - different cultural
interpretations of social and different contexts
• But it is easy to criticise and hard to present
something better!
Conclusions
The Social Pillar is the least developed area of
impact assessment
- newest (<10-20 years) No systematic model
- least developed theoretically due to difficulty in
comparing quality issues/impacts with other quality
issues & with quantifiable issues/impacts; holistic v
reductionalist views etc.
- scale of community being analysed dramatically
changes the possible matrices and impact issues
Is sustainability the core or is social an ‘add on’ to
environment and economic?
The challenge is one of integrating the three pillars.
Thank you
Employment Research Institute
Napier University, Edinburgh
Institute website: http://www2.napier.ac.uk/depts/eri/home.htm
Governance
(public participation, social inclusion, and public attitudes)
Reasons for community participation in SD
• democratic right of the public to be
involved in the process - essential part of
equitable societies
• allows communities to voice their needs &
desires, throughout the process of policy
creation, delivery and ex-post evaluation
• policy effectiveness increased if it
incorporates ideas, values and
preferences of society and communities
directly affected
Example of 1 issue:- Demography
A typology of urban and rural regions with regard to sustainable demographic development
1995-2000 (% of population)
Tot
PU
SR
PR
Per Cent of Population
1 Double positive regions
2 Growth regions with out-migration
3 Growth regions with natural decrease
4 Declining regions with in-migration
5 Declining regions with natural increase
6 Double negative regions
Source. Estimations based on Eurostat data
31,9
35.4
34.3
20.6
13,6
18,0
9,2
12,3
15,0
12.2
13.4
6.9
14.1
17.8
15.7
19.9
10.8
10.6
8.7
13.0
24.2
11.0
11.5
19.8
Employment
(employment at the local community level)
How does the policy:
• facilitate creation of jobs or the loss of jobs?
• impact a specific class of workers or
households?
• affect the demand for labour?
• impact on the functioning of the labour market?
• impact on the type and quality of jobs?
• impact on the health, safety and dignity of
workers?
Community Development
(local social benefits derived from community
participation in commercial activities and policy)
How does the policy:
• impact on the level of social capital and
activism by non-governmental groups or
individuals?
• impact on social inclusion, social
cohesion, and distribution of equity and
benefits within society?
• impact on the liveability and sense of
community wellbeing?
Health and Well-being(1)
(physical health and emotional sense of
enjoying and achieving in life)
How does the policy:
• impact on the quality of soil, surface water, and
ground water? The quality and sufficiency of
drinking water is of special importance. What are
the health gains or risks that may occur?
• impact on the occupational health risks that may
occur with the development?
Health and Well-being(2)
• impact development or change of land use on
recreational uses in the area and the effects on
the local community as well as non-local
visitation to the area?
• impact development on local infrastructure such
as hospitals, schools, waste disposal, sanitation,
and emergency response capability? Will there
be sufficient capacity?
• impact equitable distribution of the health risks,
disadvantages and benefits from development?
What is the desirable distribution of the gains and
losses among social groups?
Culture and heritage (1)
(culture is the total range of activities and ideas of a group
of people with shared traditions which are transmitted and
reinforced by members of a group)
(heritage can be explained as all the things, places and
ideas passed on from the past which are of special cultural
significance to the life of a community, including both
cultural and human-built elements)
Culture and heritage (2)
Does the policy:
• impact on cultural or heritage issues in a
community
• impact on sites and features
• impact on activities, practices, skills and events
• impact on meanings, identities, and
representations of importance to the community
• Impacts on indigenous peoples
Developing and measuring SSD
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Governance
Employment
Community Development
Health and Well-being
Culture and Heritage
Diagram: Causal model of impacts – increased
timber harvesting
Employment
Increase
Policy:
increase
timber
harvest
Increase in Population
Wages Increase
Rents Increase
Low Income
Workers Displaced
from Housing
Chart
Policy/Project
Combined Qualitative Assessment and Impact Matrix Analysis
Employment/Wages
Employment increases (large)
* Local population employed - 50 jobs
*Non-local population employed - 15 jobs
(skilled or experienced to manage
expansion)
Likelihood - 60%
All unemployed workers with appropriate
skills set are likely to gain full time
employment
Employment increases (small)
* Local population employed - 25 jobs
*Non-local population employed - 5 jobs
(skilled or experienced to manage
expansion)
Likelihood - 40%
Some unemployed workers with
appropriate skills set are likely to gain full
time employment
Wages increase (large)
*15% average wage increase
Likelihood - 50%
*Upward wage pressure through out
timber sector
*Substantial improvement for
unemployed as wages are greater than
minimum level
Wages increase (small)
*15% average wage increase
Likelihood - 50%
*Upward wage pressure through out
timber sector
*Substantial improvement for
unemployed as wages are greater than
minimum level
Population
Population increase
(large)
Likelihood - 50%
Population increase
(small)
Likelihood - 40%
Rent
Rent increase
(large)
Likelihood - 60%
Rent increase
(small)
Likelihood - 30%
Rent stable -no
change
Likelihood - 10%
Population decrease
(small)
Likelihood - 10%
Definition of Rural Regions and
Typology
• Assessing the pertinence of the OECD classification:
– Simple, transparent, takes account of internal patterns within
regions, widely recognised
– But major weaknesses include heterogeneity of NUTS 3
regions, ignores differences in “economic potential” of
regions, density thresholds are arbitrary
• 3 alternative options (all incorporating a peripherality
index) are presented and assessed, two of these give
better discrimination between different types of rural
Typology
according by
to labour
region (assessed
anova market
test) performance:
– Simple transparent disaggregative approach
– Separate demography and economic activity/unemployment
typologies
– Combined typology – reveals relatively favourable labour
market situation in PU regions, SR and PR more mixed:
fewer strong performance regions, more moderately
performing regions, and roughly the same proportion of
Bottom-line Objective
• Identify the impacts of a potential policy or
proposed project
To answer the question:
What can be done to maximise and
distribute the social benefits while
mitigating the negative impacts/costs
to individuals or groups within
society?
The sources of unsustainable development
are not always the result of greed, ignorance
or irrational choices.
Rather, they may be the result of
unintentional accumulation of rational, wellintended decisions made by people who are
operating within societies whose political and
economic systems make it difficult to act in
ways that are responsible to all those
affected in the present and in the future.
The Economics Pillar is still developing as
the principle of sustainable development is
difficult to analyse as it is contrary to
certain key assumptions/goals of
traditional economics
- weak substitutability
- discount rates
- economic agents
- (sustainable) growth as the main objective
Impact
Overview
• Society needs to identify its preferred
future and then assess, plan and
implement strategies that move it
significantly towards this.
• It is important that environmental,
economic and social sustainability factors
are fully incorporated in the choices of
direction and in seeking to achieve it.
European Union Policy
Background
• The Lisbon 2000 Strategy (introduces
social dimension, esp. related to work)
• Gothenburg Strategy 2001
• European Union Sustainable Development
Strategy 2006/7
• Social Agenda 2005-2010
• European Employment Strategy (first in
1997) and the Luxembourg Process
Council of the EU
• Employment, Social Policy, Health and
Consumer Affairs (EPSCO)
• The Environment Council
Sustainability Impact
Assessment Tools (SAIT)
• Currently in development
– SENSOR
– EFORWOOD
– PLUREL
– SEAMLESS