Abstract
The purpose of this Toolkit is to assist developers, consultants, and researchers carrying out Socio-Economic Impact Assessments (SEIA) for different types of offshore marine developments, plans or interventions, to choose the most suitable methods for conducting participatory community and stakeholder engagement and social research to collect primary data that may be needed for the SEIA. The Toolkit draws on the principles of Social Impact Assessment, and incorporates a range of methods used for social research and community engagement. The Toolkit is targeted at project-level SEIA for developments or interventions occurring in the sea such as offshore renewable developments or marine protected areas, but also considers methods which are appropriate to use at Plan level such sectoral, regional or national marine planning. The objective of SEIA is to ensure that new developments or interventions are planned and continue to develop in a way that takes account of potential impacts and considers the views of those affected. To this end, the SEIA process has three main aims:
• To gather good quality information and evidence that enables an accurate assessment of potential socio-economic impacts
• To engage with communities and stakeholders to explain what the development or intervention might involve, and ensure that people are involved and have a say in the decisions that affect them
• To use the information gathered through data collection and the relationships developed during engagement to manage any impacts generated by the development or intervention
Achieving these aims necessitates using methods that are rigorous, able to assess and measure change, and which are in line with the principles of SEIA (that are set out in Section 2). It is also important to recognise that different methods will achieve different aims, and to use methods which are most appropriate for the activity in question i.e. engagement, data collection.
The Toolkit therefore provides a categorisation of a wide range of participatory and social research methods, and analysis of the ability of different methods to meet the requirements of different stages of socio-economic impact assessment.