Introduction

Honorable Minister, President of the International Association of Impact Assessment, Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear Friends. 

For me, today is a very special day. I am deeply honored to have been invited to IAIA 2002 to deliver, today, a keynote address to the 22nd Annual Conference of this proud and important association. My first acquaintance, or love affair, with IAIA happened about 7 years ago, in Durban, South Africa. As part of a rather large delegation from the World Bank I had the wonderful experience of meeting, well, people like me—from all over the world. People who were as obsessed with impacts and the assessment of impacts as myself. Perhaps even more so. 

I thoroughly enjoyed those days in sunny Durban. I also learned a great deal, as did my Bank colleagues at the time. I am convinced from both personal experience and things I pick up from others that the World Bank’s work on environmental assessment has greatly benefited from the professional network that IAIA represents. I am equally convinced that is true for other international and national institutions and organizations. IAIA is important. IAIA is having an impact. Congratulations.

Due to divine providence, or destiny, or ruthless, calculating behaviour, or pure chance—whatever you may prefer to believe—I’ve had the rather rare opportunity of dealing with impact assessment from the very different positions of (1) an international trench bureaucrat at the World Bank; (2) a development policy maker at the national/bilateral level; (3) a private consultant; and (4) back again at the political level.  The one common denominator in all of this has been international development. Conseqently, what I will talk about here today will relate first and foremost to that field.

Impact Assessment is Having an Impact

Let me first of all state something obvious. There is no sensational news in this, but nevertheless it is important to say it so that you know where I’m coming from: Impact assessment is here to stay. Impact assessment is in continuous and exciting development. Impact assessment is becoming more and more relevant to decision making. It is becoming more and more crucial for good decision making. And still, too often impact assessment fails miserably. Or succeeds only “mediocerly”. Too often, the potential is not realized. You all know this from first hand experience. In a certain way, this is the perrennial, inevitable, eternal red thread of all IAIA conferences from the very beginning:  Impact assessment could deliver so much more. How can we improve the impact of impact assessment? What are we doing wrong? With all our efforts, why isn’t the world becoming a better place, for frogs and trees, wetlands and forests, villages and cities? 

I’m not going to attempt to provide, yet another, comprehensive diagnosis of this chronic deficiency. I have already, like many of you also, attempted something along those lines. First in the context of reviewing World Bank experience with EA in the early and mid-90s. (By the way, the report was titled “The Impact of Environmental Assessment”, which is almost identical to today’s theme.)  Second, last year when I, as a consultant to the Bank, undertook an analysis of worldwide and World Bank experience with strategic assessments. Those humble attempts are both available upon request from the World Bank, if I’m not mistaken. Here I will contain myself to discuss a couple of specific issues that I personally have come to regard as important pieces of the puzzle. Both issues have to do with the fascinating subject of “what happens when the world of impact assessment meets the world of politics”.

Norway’s Experience

Let me first do a brief detour into Norway’s particular experience with impact assessment. We have had EIA legislation in Norway since 1990. Annually about 50 projects undergo EIA procedures, altogether about 600 projects so far. EIA covers social as well as environmental impacts and impacts on natural resources. EIA legislation is part of the Planning and Building Act, and thus is mainly tied to land use planning. 

Evaluations show that the instrument does work. EIA functions as a uniform process that structures the cooperation between the developer, the relevant government bodies and the general public, increases knowledge and enhances awareness of environmental impacts. It also leads to more thorough planning.The cost of EIA varies, but does not exceed 0.1- 0.5 per cent of the total project costs, and it has not been shown to delay projects. We also have reason to believe that alterations in the design and other modifications are made more often when there is an IA process than when there is not. This is due to the fact that the environmental impact statement reveals the need for modifications and the possibility of making them, and to the fact that actors that may have good suggestions for modifications are brought into the process. 

On the other hand, there is room for improvement in the way the environmental impact statement is followed up in the construction and implementation phases, and in the treatment of alternatives in the process. I should think this sounds familiar to most of you. To me it’s my experience in the World Bank all over again. Also as far as SEA and the socalled third generation of IA, sustainability assessment, are concerned, our experience mirrors that of many other countries.

Impact assessment and politics:  Worlds apart

Ladies and gentlemen:  I know from personal experience. Let there be no doubt. The world of impact assessment and the world of politics are worlds apart. Most of you on the one hand, and I on the other, live in different worlds. When people in my world look over into your world they don’t understand it, or they may find it amusingly weird. And when you guys look into the world of politics you get exactly the same feeling. Plus a dash of condescending, fatherly disgust. Oh those politicians—what can you expect?

It’s a bit like looking into the strange, weird world of Gary Larson’s “The Far Side”. Don’t try to kid me. I know what you think about the political world. “We produce these wonderful, clear and compelling EIAs. Works of genious, really. We come up with real solutions. Better alternatives. But these politicians, do they get it? No!  They distort our conclusions. Or ignore them. Or both. 

By I’ve got news for you. We consider YOU the weirdos. We’ve all seen Larson’s biologists stuck in some swamp looking for bugs. Now, that’s you guys. While we focus on the really important things. The world of tomorrow and the soundbyte of today.

Take for instance this now famous or infamous hydropower project in Tanzania, Kihansi Falls. Does it ring a bell? Heard about the tadpoles the size of a thumbnail that live there and only there along a small stretch of river? It’s a marvelous illustration of the clash of worlds that I’m talking about. For the EA-people this tadpole takes on a monumental importance. Well, it IS important. It only exists here. We know very little about it. It would go extinct unless we did something. It is worth saving. It is unique. We have a moral obligation. Besides, it could carry the cure of cancer or some other disease. And, what’s important, thanks to the EA we KNOW how to save it even while going ahead with the power project. All we have to do is invest a few million dollars in a tadpole spraying facility to compensate for the loss of natural waterfall spray on which the tadpole depends for its survival. 

How do you think your average Joe the politician reacts to this? He goes nuts. He yells and swears. “Here I am trying to develop my nation and you come bothering me with a slimy tadpole? I will only get the loan if I do what? I thought you said “construct a tadpole spraying facility”, but clearly I misheard you, right?”  And on and on it goes. 

In this case, the EA process led to real results, at least as far as the tadpoles are concerned. The spray is on and the tadpoles have never been happier. Too bad they don’t vote. 

I’m sure you could all produce similar stories. Similar examples of what happens in the fascinating intersection between impact assessment and politics. Some of the stories make us laugh. Others make us cry. Frequently they do both.

I entered the political world in 1997. It was a shock. To start with, I had close to no background or training in the world of politics as such, apart from studies in political science. Secondly, I had spent almost all my professional life to that date outside of Norway and I had very little knowledge of Norwegian politics and hardly any network of political people that I knew. More relevant to today’s topic, I soon discovered that all my work and insight into the field of impact assessment was of very limited direct value. At least I didn’t see the value at first. In other words, I was lost. If it hadn’t been for the fact that I knew something about working in a bureaucracy of international development, and the internal and external politics of such a bureaucracy, I wouldn’t have lasted very long.

Since I felt I knew something about environmental science and policy, and impact assessment in particular, I tried to institute certain changes in the Norwegian aid system in those areas. I may have had some success. But, very quickly my mind and my time got absorbed with new, difficult—but after the initial shock and panic—very interesting and fascinating new challenges.  Debt relief for the poorest countries. Developing a new strategy for our humanitarian aid. Introducing modern information and communication technology into the foreign service. Bilateral agreements with our partner countries. Fighting the Ministry of Finance to avoid cuts in the aid budget. Writing the Minister’s speeches to Parliament. Defending our policies in the media.

I would lie if I didn’t admit that the world of impact assessment faded into the background. There was just too much stuff going on. And I couldn’t easily apply my impact assessment experience directly. More able people might have been able to utilize skills at impact prediction and staging public consultation for making superb political votewinning strategy. I failed or didn’t really try. Nor was it appropriate for me to get involved in the specific projects supported by us, neither during preparation nor implementation. 

I’m now back in the political world. And what I just said is still very much the case. However, I take great pride in the fact that when the Minister called me to this current position I was roaming Tanzania. Back on the Far Side. Not getting sprayed among tadpoles but rather reviewing road projects in terms of their compliance with EA guidelines. So, I am—when it really comes down to it—one of you.

The big question remains:  How on earth can you/we as impact assessment practicioners, regulators and policymakers narrow the gap? Improve the impact on authorities and politicians of impact assessments?

As a rule, politicians at the national level will normally have a hard time relating to assessments at the project level. The only exceptions are (1) if the project is big and prestigious (associated with nation-building); and (2) if major public controversy flares up over, say, a tadpole. However, it doesn’t have to be like this. I will get back to how things could be different a bit later. It has to do with how we communicate.

Where impact assessment more easily has a direct bearing and relevance on policy makers and politics, is where the assessment is strategic. You all knew this one was coming. And it is really rather obvious. Strategic assessments are about presenting decisionmakers with insights on the consequences of “their kinds of decisions”. Policy decisions. Planning decisions. Programme decisions. To put it this way:  If someone were to undertake a strategic assessment of Norwegian energy development policies—I would certainly be obliged to relate to it. And I would enjoy it. 

We still have some ways to go, worldwide, before strategic impact assessments have become truly mainstreamed. I feel we are still in a pilot phase. A number of approaches have been tried out, especially in Europe, North America and Australia/New Zealand, with different and mixed results. The World Bank and others have pionereed different kinds of SEAs in a number of developing countries. 

So it shouldn’t be of much surprise that results are also mixed. And that the “meeting of the worlds” is not always productive. However, I am convinced that the IA community is on the right track. 

Perhaps the most promising finding in international SEA experience to date is that it seems to have great potential for meeting real and growing needs in many developing countries. SEA can help to clarify economic, social and environmental trade-offs at the level of policy and planning, and help to develop balanced responses to the problems it identifies. This may prove invaluable in countries that are experiencing growing tensions and conflicts over access to natural resources and the use of environmental services. Other environmental decision-support tools such as EIA, environmental economic models, GIS, etc. cannot in themselves fulfil this role, since they lack the iterative, consultative element so central to SEA. 

As in the case of project level assessment work much can be done to improve the quality of the technical SEA work, and the quality of the process. When I say “quality of technical work” I mean things such as the robustness of impact predictions, relevance of the alternatives analyzed, the quality of the environmental management plan, etc.

When I talk about the process, obviously I mean how the process of public involvement is screwed together, the interface with the overall decisionmaking process, etc.

All this is important and many of you could speak much better than me on these subjects, based on long and indepth experience as practicioners, regulators, researchers.

Impact Assessment as Narrative

But for the remainder of this intervention I want to talk about something else. I want to challenge you to think about how you communicate, whether we are at the project or the strategic level of assessment. How, and in what form, do you go about trying to get the key points across to the public, to the decision makers? I’m not referring to the assessment report here. Not even primarily to the Executive Summary, although the summary is clearly important for communication purposes. 

I am referring to the fine art of communicating with an impact. You know, we as more or less refined academics of background, we are all trained to treasure and use “objective”, linear logic and produce crisp analyses supported by nice powerpoint slides with boxes and arrows, flow charts, matrices and so on. We are trained to communicate a simplified but more or less truthful representation of the real world, in a correct, somewhat detached scientific language.

I’ve got news for you. It doesn’t work. Not if the ambition is to do more than looking good in our own IA circles. Because: normal human beings, whether they be politicians or not, cannot be reached or persuaded that way. We’re not going to change our behavior or get convinced about something neither as individuals nor as complex organizations or governments simply by being offered some run-of-the-mill 20 minute presentation, no matter how nice the powerpoint slides with flowcharts, boxes, matrixes and arrows. We’re simply not screwed together that way. Cognitive psychologists and communications specialists know this.

Let me quote something for you: 
 

• If non-linear phenomena dominate the world of both living and nonliving things, and if we have only recently developed the mathematical sophistication to deal with such phenomena, and if even these techniques are well nigh useless for the purposes of communication, how on earth has the human race coped with complex nonlinear phenomena all these millennia? How do we understand what is going on? How do we communicate about it?

• A major part of the answer is narrative. One reason why we live in a soup of narratives, why narratives permeate our lives and understanding, is that resorting to narratives is hte way in which we have learned to cope woth our world of enormously complex phenomena. Even while scientists and schoolteachers have been telling us to abandon these unscientific approaches, and adopt linear abstract thinking, the human race as used its common sense and stubbornly stuck with narratives as the most usable tool to cope with complexity. We have used the narrative language of stories as the most appropriate instrument to communicate the nature and shape and behavior of complex, adaptive phenomena. Stories capture the essence of living things, which are quintessentially complex phenomena... The fact that narratives are not mathematically precise, and in fact full of fuzzy qualitative relationships, seems to be a key to their success in enabling us to cope with complexity (Denning, page 112-113).

This quote is from a remarkable book by Stephen Denning, a former colleague of mine from the World Bank who is now working as an independent consultant. It is called “The Springboard” and the subtitle is:  “How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations”. I take it that you got his main point. If you want human beings to move in any particular direction, science and analysis no matter how rigorous, is not enough. It is necessary. But not sufficient. 

This can be hard to accept at first. Listen to this: 
 

• I have been brought up, and educated for decades, to think that analytical reasoning is the epitome of thinking, and that stories are of no more than secondary importance. I am convinced that any success that I have achieved at school is rooted in my ability to think analytically—to see the relations between concepts and to be able to explain them. A similar experience in my working life has confirmed the same world view. Analytical is good; anecdotal is bad. I know that the world of science and enlightenment emerged from an era of darkness where there was dependence on myth and fairy tale and anecdote. It is selfevident that we have entered the more reliable world of science and logic and verification through experiment. The greatest material progress that the world has ever seen has occurred because we have put storytelling behind us. Instead, we have built our world on the rigor of scientific thinking. These are such fundamental assumptions that it is difficult for me even to imagine any alternative, let alone call the assumptions into question. 

• And yet, here in my day-to-day living, I am confronted with unmistakable signs of the opposite phenomenon. The more I concentrate on analytics, the more I run into difficulty and resistance. The more I put the analytical thinking to one side and instead put forward the story, the easier things seem to be. These questions race through my mind in a disorienting fashion. Is everything that I have been raised and educated to believe, and have faith in, wrong? What on earth is going on? (Denning, p. 51-52) 

I am convinced that Denning is right. People, all over the world and throughout history, have always used stories, narratives as the principal means of creating meaning in a chaotic world and for getting important points across to others. When matters get really complex, I would argue, what other options are there? Linear logic becomes almost useless. 

Ladies and gentlemen, what is impact assessment if not attempts at making sense of extreme complexity? Isn’t it per definition some sort of complex narrative?  Why then, when we get to the point where we really have to communicate convincingly the key messages to decision makers, do we let go of the narrative as the communication tool? Why don’t we dare to be storytellers? Why not tell the story of life in the affected community, with and without the project? The story should already be there, buried in the EA report. Why, then, revert to quantifications and cold graphics when we summarize the results?  It is the story of risks, impacts, avoided impacts, reduced impacts—on people and nature--and the story of possible alternatives to the set course, which make IA a truly exciting process. Add to that the dynamics of public involvement and political rivalry, and the mix gets really interesting. The stuff that stories are made of. Let’s bring out those stories. Let’s communicate them! Let’s use them as the springboard that helps people and decisionmakers soar to new levels of understanding and produces splashing changes in projects, programs and policies. 

Thank you for your attention.