Strategic Environmental Assessment as a Means of Pursuing Sustainability: Ten Advantages and Ten Challenges

While strategic environmental assessment can be a powerful tool for fostering progress towards sustainability, effective implementation involves confronting a set of substantial challenges. This paper, based on Canadian and international literature and experience, outlines the ten most compelling advantages of strategic environmental assessment for sustainability and the ten main challenges faced in implementation. The ten advantages of the strategic environmental assessment for sustainability are that it • provides a process for integrated pursuit of sustainability objectives in policy making and planning; • operationalises sustainability principles; • improves the information base for policy making, planning and programme development; • is proactive and broad in ways that strengthen consideration of fundamental issues; • improves analysis of broad public purposes and alternatives; • facilitates proper attention to cumulative effects; • facilitates greater transparency and more effective public participation at the strategic level; • provides a framework for more effective and efficient project-level assessments; • provides a base for design and implementation of better projects where project-level assessment is not required; and • facilitates establishment of a more comprehensive overall system of sustainability application at all levels from the setting of decision objectives to the monitoring of implementations effects. The ten main challenges for effective implementation are • limited information and unavoidable uncertainties; • boundary-setting complexities; • primitive methodologies; • difficulties in defining the proper role of public participants and ensuring effective involvement; • co-ordination and integration of strategic assessment with assessment processes at other levels; • institutional resistance; • conflict between integrated assessment and bureaucratic fragmentation; • jurisdictional overlap; • limitations of the standard rational planning and policy making model; and • resistance to integration of strategic assessment in core decision making. The paper concludes with a discussion of the major implications.