Strategic environmental assessment monitoring: the enduring forgotten sibling

Monitoring in Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) is central to determining whether the assessment outcomes and associated mitigation measures have had the desired effect and the environment has been protected on the ground. Despite the critical role this procedural stage plays, and the international attempts to advance practice in this area, monitoring continues to be poorly performed 20 years on from the implementation of the European SEA Directive. Several frameworks and approaches can be found in the academic literature, but many are conceptual and arguably fail to provide pragmatic unsophisticated solutions that are readily implementable in practice. This paper attempts to address this by first outlining common issues reported in the academic literature in the last two decades, then highlighting ongoing issues, as identified in two recent Irish research projects, such as poor definition of monitoring indicators and lack of integration of monitoring commitments into plans/programmes. It then puts forward a set of recommendations intended to foster a practical and sensible approach to kick monitoring into action.