ID: 1663
Presenting Author: Emilia Ravn Boess
Session: 604 - Everything Everywhere All at Once: Harnessing Holistic Impact Assessment
Status: pending
An extended tiering typology through dimensions of 'delegation', 'direction' and 'strength' furthers frameworks for tiering and contributes to more procedurally effective, transparent and holistic IA.
Tiering is crucial if wanting to establish coherency between EA reports and ensure holistic integration of insights gained at various planning levels. It is an approach for capturing and bringing forward important decisions made early in the planning hierarchy and it ensures transparency in assessing impacts, at what level certain decisions are made, and how strategic and project-levels account for strategic goals. Without it, EA reports become isolated and miss out on opportunities for holistic and cumulative understandings of environmental impacts. Earlier tiering frameworks have focused mainly on the ‘direction’ in which insights flow. But direction is not the only pertinent characteristic. We propose extending the tiering concept along three dimensions, ‘delegation’, ‘direction’ and ‘strength’, to gain a nuanced understanding of the role that strategic levels have in communicating with project levels and that project levels have in responding to and informing strategic levels. Through the development of a tiering typology and the application onto a Danish case study, this research furthers theoretical frameworks underpinning the concept of tiering and shows how such understanding can contribute to a more procedurally effective, transparent, and informed impact assessment practice.
Emilia is an assistant professor at Aalborg University in Denmark and works with objective-led EA and systems thinking for more sustainable decision-making in IA.
Coauthor 1: Lone Kørnøv