Social Assessment
Based on Michael Cernea*
Professor
George Washington University
This introduction refers to the role of social assessment at project level. The social assessment should be an indispensable part of the set of analyses (environmental, economic, financial, technical) for the projects and not a freestanding exercise or additional project report. Social Assessments can enhance quality at entry, increase social benefits, and lay the groundwork for environmental interventions that have more impact and are more sustainable.
In project analysis and design the social assessments perform three specific functions: to assess the social issues requiring allocation of resources and identify the principal social stakeholders and their interaction; to design the social provisions needed in the project package to help achieve the project’s environmental, economic, and other social goals and impacts; and to formulate the social strategy for participatory implementation. Together, these elements support all stages of the project’s cycle. Each is explained below.
Assessment
Social development and conservation interventions should consider early assessments of project’s distributional impacts in terms of differential access to income, productive assets, employment and services, helping to promote stakeholder’s participation and the strengthening of local institutional capacity for self-development; and aiming at minimizing or mitigating, to the extent possible, adverse social impacts and risks. Social assessments, with the steps outlined below, are a means to these ends.
A social assessment describes and explains the social fabric within which a project intervenes. The main content of the assessment at this initial stage is social mapping or diagnosis: defining the population involved by generating data on its key demographic characteristics, needs, and willingness to support the project. The social assessment elucidates the social issues that will have to be addressed by the proposed activity. Stakeholder analysis helps build on understanding of social diversity, reflects relevant gender and ethnic factors, recognizes indigenous groups or other vulnerable population segments, and identifies the structural reasons for their vulnerability.
Social analysis must be carried out in a participatory manner, with the researchers engaging the area population in the self-definition of needs, articulation of feasible solutions, and mobilization of locally available resources.
Design
The findings of social analysis and public consultations are converted into social design provisions and incorporated in the project package, to complement its conservation and technical provisions. This is essential for achieving the project’s goals and long-term social and environmental sustainability.
The social design of projects is that part of project formulation that explicitly translates general social policy concerns and locally identified needs into project-specific measures and sets out ways to accomplish them. Such measures include, for instance, equitably distributing project benefits, reducing poverty, eliminating social exclusion, and increasing social cohesion. They may also include provisions for expansion of social and ecosystem services, human resources development, and building of social capital. Social design also involves, when necessary, gender-specific provisions and the protection of indigenous and other vulnerable groups. Explicit social design is required, too, for strengthening local institutional capacity and in situations that require special social action plans. Mechanisms for feedback loops from area populations are also incorporated in project design.
The social design of operations address the potential social risks of certain kinds of conservation interventions. Development projects and environmental policies have social costs that must be recognized in a timely fashion in order to allocate counterbalancing resources and avoid cost externalization on affected populations. The forecasting of social costs, identification of at-risk groups, and determination of social mitigations to be pursued contribute equally to the social assessment, informing both project design and implementation. In addressing potential adverse impacts, the social analysts must favor preventive measures over mitigatory or compensatory measures, whenever feasible.
Implementation
Implementing an environmental policy must be seen as a social process, not as a sequence of administrative or technical decisions. The organizations are expected to prepare an implementation plan that should include the participation of key stakeholders and spell out how the project’s goals will be carried out. It is crucial that the implementation strategy be formulated to encompass the roles of all principal stakeholders. The social strategy for implementation must therefore answer a fundamental question: How to mobilize and organize social action in order to translate project design into reality? Not all stakeholders are expected to agree, and measures for building consensus and trust, resolving conflicts, and negotiating acceptable opinions are areas where social assessments can make substantive contributions to charting the social path for project execution. The implementation strategy must also consider how to establish delivery mechanisms that people and institutions can manage effectively.
Social assessments can contribute to the design of implementation strategies by facilitating two-way information and communication between the project and its constituencies, developing awareness, determining what incentives may be provided, and making recommendations for mobilizing non-governmental and local community organizations. The social assessment also can set the stage for beneficiaries’ participation in monitoring early impacts during implementation, to help develop necessary adjustments while the project is being executed.
* Excerpt from Michael Cernea and Ayse Kudat (Eds). Social Assessments for Better Development: Case Studies in Russia and Central Asia (1997). Washington, DC: The World Bank. Adapted with permission of the author.
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