Social impact assessment

Social impact assessment, broadly defined, is a process of identifying and evaluating the impacts of a new project. Social impact assessment (SIA) emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, after the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in the United States required assessment of environmental impacts, and urged the consideration of impacts on community facilities, health, noise, low income populations, intangible impacts, and more.

To understand the roots of SIA in rural sociology, check out Cramer, Dietz, and Johnston (1980), Freudenberg (1986), or Jacquet (2014).

Social impact assessment became a worldwide practice, and there is a wider International Association of Impact Assessment.

But there are a number of critiques around how it is often used as a check-box exercise that fails to make an impact. Scholars are critically examining its future — check out a 2023 special issue of Current Sociology on the future of SIA.

Alongside SIA, there is also Technological Assessment (TA), which focuses on a technology (and used to have its own government office!) There’s also Social Life-Cycle Assessment, which typically focuses on the social impacts of products throughout their life cycle. There is also an increasing demand for environmental justice assessment, which some states, like Washington, have instituted. Cumulative burden assessment is an important part of this, and recent legislation in New York and New Jersey requires examination of cumulative impacts on overburdened communities.