Sia Cannot Be Conducted Without Local Participation

SIA cannot be conducted without Local Participation

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Introduction

Community involvement in large projects set to affect all the stakeholders in a society is an inevitable aspect for any public or private organisation aspiring to initiate and run large projects seamlessly. In this study, the use of Social Impact Assessment (SIA) has been explored to show the importance of local participation in ensuring success for the projects that have direct or indirect influence to the society. An instance of functionality attributes in the engagement of local participation for the proper application and utilization of SIA has been explored in this study. Majorly basing the argument on Australia, the idea of engaging local participation is proved as inevitable in any commencement and running of large projects.

Local Participation as the Foundation for SIA

As explored by Franks, the main focus for the SIA is to create critical process of identifying, avoiding, mitigating, as well as enhancing the development outcomes with respect to the possible social issues denotable from the local community . SIA remains within the idea of ensuring comprehension of the fundamental social issues and respond to them by choosing the most effective development processes to benefit all stakeholders. SIA is critical process that play critical role on ensuring possible inter-societal disruptions are mitigated; Drysdale offers a proper reason for the need of local participation. Drysdale argues, “Some countries that are dependent on revenue from natural resources are often hampered in their pursuit of sustainable development due to weak formal institutions and governance” . Franks adds that the reason for applying SIA to examine the basic community-based attributes as a way to form a proper gateway for collective development is because social impact is a reality that is felt or experienced by an economic unit, social group, or even at an individual level. The impact of any development forms certain effect to the mentioned individuals, economic unit, or social group, and therefore it is inevitable to eliminate their participation when conducting SIA .

As argued by Lockie, Franetovich, Sharma, and Rolfe, predominant goals for the participation of local public in the SIA is mostly considered for proper understanding of the perception of the community concerning activity, resolving possible conflicts and reach consensus on the activity of project . Some of the other critical goals for engaging public participation in project development through the SIA may involve demonstration of transparency