Review of the concepts, methodologies, and validity of Social Impact Assessments and their implications for Japanese impact assessments

Abstract

This research aimed to answer the following research questions: what are the current challenges related to social impact assessments (SIAs) in the context of Japanese assessments of interventions and how they could be solved. The intention to raise these questions were that clear recognition of domestic SIA problems and possible directions for their solution among Japanese SIA researchers and practitioners could be the first step to solve such domestic SIA problems. This analysis was made by reviewing the past literature related to Japanese SIA activities in academic journals and extracting their important issues and challenges. Based on the relevance of these challenges, this paper further reviewed the global SIA literature in relation to ideal SIA practices to find clues for solving the problems raised in past Japanese evaluation practices. The challenges of Japanese SIAs raised were the narrow scoping, inexistence of rigorous stakeholder analysis, ex-ante and ex-post mitigation procedures especially when there are negative impacts on stakeholders, and not thorough adoption of participatory approach and qualitative methods. To solve these problems, recommendations regarding the domestic discussions on finding a desirable scoping and procedures, such as the necessity of the mandatory inclusion of negative impacts in scoping if there are such negative impacts, and ex-ante and ex-post mitigation procedures were presented. Re-examination of scoping and procedures if necessary was recommended. In addition, the validity of the adoption of participatory approach and qualitative methods in SIAs, which are indispensable in democratic society, was discussed.