Towards making EIA more human-centric: Demonstration in Nepal of a values crystallization approach to capture local shared values for scoping use

Abstract

Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA) are a critical component of planning and decision-making processes before projects are conducted, because they are used to forecast and inform mitigation of potential impacts on the local community, including its social, physical, and natural environments. Current EIA processes predominantly focus on issues that can be directly measured using objective methods, with mostly tokenistic inadequate use of suites of qualitative methodologies needed for identification and documentation of issues relating to community shared values. On the other hand, protests and tensions are known to easily arise which are related to such human values-based issues not being addressed. In this pragmatic study, a method is demonstrated which can bridge this gap, by capturing local community shared values in a well-defined manner and short time. The approach, called WeValue InSitu, enables local communities to construct their own bespoke group shared values statements in a specialized crystallization process, with outputs which are well-articulated proto-indicators. In this study we compare the outputs from two existing scoping reports of EIA in Nepal with the outputs from the values crystallization approach which we conducted with ten groups in a village in Nepal, and show that the latter brings out many more, and more localised, shared values of the community, and additionally reveals underlying interrelationships between values, producing conceptual maps for planning effective mitigations. Future studies can investigate whether the achievements of this method offer any advantages to existing qualitative methods in improving EIA-SIA scoping, and/or whether the hegemony of objectivism of institutions and proponents is an unsurmountable barrier.