Moving to next generation community-based environmental assessment

Abstract

ABSTRACT Undertaking environmental assessments for small, rural development projects has proven to be both vexing and essential. Our research considers one approach to assessing such projects, community-based environmental assessment (CBEA). The purpose of our work was to gauge current CBEA practice and consider next generation approaches in the face of challenges such as lack of adequate capacity, resource and power imbalances, achieving meaningful participation, narrow conceptions of sustainability, and weak follow-up and monitoring. Through a literature review and semi-structured interviews with various EA experts from around the globe, we consider these issues and propose a framework for next-generation community-based environmental assessment (NG-CBEA) that builds on four key next generation themes; sustainability, meaningful public participation, follow-up and monitoring, and learning.