Sea Must Learn How Policy Making Works

The concept of strategic environmental assessment (SEA) has developed rapidly in recent years and has been extensively promoted by environmental assessment (EA) practitioners. SEA has been the focus of considerable dialogue, increasing regulatory attention and emerging evidence of application. This paper seeks to advance the potential for the adoption of SEA in policy making by focusing attention on policy making processes themselves, and on the need for SEA procedures to be moulded to these existing policy making activities. We argue that widespread adoption of SEA concepts is unlikely unless EA practitioners become much more cognisant of the policy making process. Too much of the literature on SEA to date is insular — EA practitioners communicating amongst themselves. Dialogue on SEA development must be between EA proponents and policy makers/theorists if SEA of policy is to fulfil its promise. In order to make SEA of policies effective, SEA must influence the decisions that are intrinsic in policy making. We provide a simplified policy making model and demonstrate that it is necessary, and possible, for SEA to provide environmental input throughout the stages of policy formulation and decision making. The policy making context must drive the form and process of the SEA. In effect, this is an extension of Brown & Hill's (1995) notion of decision scoping, originally developed to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of project-based EIA, to the environmental assessment of policies.