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The literature on strategic environmental assessment (SEA) reveals a growing number of scholars suggesting that SEA faces challenges, notably in terms of its capacity to support collaborative processes. One possible reason for this to happen relates to practice being saturated with standardized procedures that proffered SEA as a ‘night watchman’ on conventional impact-based conceptions. Such conceptions are mostly technocratic, leaving limited space for research-practitioners collaboration, and also small room for change provided they are legally well established. This article aims to show that adopting a more strategic thinking approach in conceptualizing and practicing SEA may increase opportunities for collaborative governance. Strategic thinking for sustainability (ST4S) is an innovative approach that can be used with SEA but also with other policy-making and planning assessment contexts and processes. It is strongly supported upon principles of governance, revealing a great capacity to promote multi-actor collaboration across institutional and disciplinary boundaries. We ground our research in the cross-fields of power, institutional and relational perspectives. We consider a multi-actor perspective to understand the potential of ST4S to promote relationships between different actors in a decision process and understand their institutional logics within processes of development. We also consider the notion of boundary spanning within ST4S to understand how collaborative practices (and potentials) can aim for cross-boundary work. We illustrate our analysis with concrete cases that used an ST4S approach (a SEA in Portugal and Peru, and a sustainability strategy in Portugal) to reflect on the challenging ‘relational turn’ needed for lasting collaborative practices.
Partidärio et al. (Fri,) studied this question.