Social Impact Assessment Training Course

About the course

This intermediate course provides a current overview of leading industry practice related to social impact assessment and management that is consistent with IAIA’s International Principles for SIA and Guidance for SIA. We address the current issues relevant to the business of managing the social impacts of extractives projects.

The trainers include a leading academic in SIA and a person with considerable industry consulting experience.

In our course, SIA is regarded as being more than just the ex-ante prediction of social impacts, it should be the process of managing the social issues, and a mechanism to ensure social and economic development.

This course will appeal to early career IA practitioners, people who commission SIAs, people who would like to do them, people who are involved in assessing them, and people with a general interest in the field. Specific course objectives are to:

• Increase awareness of new developments in SIA thinking and practice;
• Create awareness of the benefits to proponents of seeing SIA as an ongoing process of adaptive management and engagement with stakeholders, rather than as a point-in-time assessment;
• Strengthen understandings of the social nature of impacts on communities;
• Build practical knowledge in conducting SIAs;
• Increase ability to critically evaluate SIAs;
• Increase awareness of approaches to ensure SIA commitments are implemented;
• Provide tools to realise the potential of proponents to contribute to sustainability outcomes;
• Increase comprehension of the ethical, human rights and legal issues in SIA practice.

Topics Covered

• What are social impacts?
• A brief history of SIA and what ‘international standards’ look like now
• Tasks undertaken as part of an SIA process
• Scoping the social issues:
  • Frameworks every SIA practitioner should be aware of
  • Methods to systematically identify Human Rights issues as part of social impact scoping
  • Community involvement methods
• Methods for selecting indicators in order to establish a baseline, predict and assess social and human rights impacts
• Decision tools for establishing negative impact significance, social risk vs business risk, and priorities for action
• Decision tools for establishing positive impact significance, social opportunities vs business opportunities, and priorities for action
• Working in integrated impact assessment project teams
• Understanding the factors that influence whether a mitigation or enhancement strategy will actually be effective
• Trends in community-based monitoring
• How to manage ethical issues in SIA practice

Teaching Techniques

The training course is designed to have an effective blend of instruction and participatory process. As facilitators, the trainers establish a friendly supportive environment that enables participation by all, being mindful of cultural background and personal learning styles. The experiences of the participants are utilised by encouraging personal contribution and general discussion. Learning is facilitated through the use of table-based groupwork and the use of a structured case-study exercise. Each participant will receive a USB with useful resources.

About Prof Frank Vanclay - University of Groningen

Frank is the Professor and Head of the Department of Cultural Geography in the Faculty of Spatial Sciences, University of Groningen, The Netherlands, where he has been since 2010. An Australian by birth, Frank specialises in the areas of: social impact assessment and management; social performance; social licence to operate; human rights and corporate social responsibility; social understandings of place; social aspects of resource extraction, and social aspects of natural resource management, farming and agriculture. Frank is especially noted for his role in developing IAIA’s 2003 International Principles for Social Impact Assessment and 2015 Guidance on Social Impact Assessment.

About Ana Maria Esteves - Community Insights Group

Ana Maria is founder of CIG, an international social impact management consultancy. She is a recognized practitioner in the areas of social performance, social investment and local content, especially in the mining, oil & gas and energy sector. She is an Industry Fellow at CSRM and visiting professor at the Faculty of Engineering, University of Strathclyde (UK). Ana Maria goes beyond impact assessment to work with clients to contribute to social development at the local level. Her clients have included: Anglo American, BG, BHP Billiton, Goldcorp, Newmont, Rio Tinto, Shell, and Tullow Oil. She works all over the world, with a concentration in sub-Saharan Africa. Mozambique-born, she is an Australian citizen and currently resides in The Netherlands. She is the current President of the International Association for Impact Assessment, founder of SIAhub, an online resource for the SIA community of practice, and co-author of the IAIA Guidance for SIA.