Integrated impact assessment: coming out of the shadows?

The very nature of impact assessment calls for integrated approaches, yet over the years they have been overshadowed in mainstream practice by discipline-based approaches. The chapter examines the evolution of integrated approaches from the early days of impact assessment, to identify elements of a potential conceptual framework to support integrated impact assessment at the project level. Much of the discussion of integration in impact assessment has tended to focus on procedural issues: essentially how the impact assessment is organised and carried out; substantive issues, and especially methodological considerations, have not received as much attention. However, with the increased focus on sustainable development since the 1980s, and the rise of Integrated Assessment methods allied to climate change research in the 1990s, there has been a flow of new ideas influencing thinking about integrated impact assessment since 2000. The final part of the chapter discusses how key procedural characteristics might be allied with substantive systems-based methodologies to provide a framework of theory and principles that might help bring integrated impact assessment out of the shadows and back into the mainstream.