Empowering the public in environmental assessment: Advances or enduring challenges?

Public participation is a cornerstone of good plan-making and Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA), allowing local information and concerns to be captured, residents to be engaged in assessment and plan-making processes, and opposition to plan implementation to be reduced. Effective public participation in SEA depends on who is involved, how they are involved, and what influence they have over the SEA and plan-making processes. Using this who-how-what framework, this paper presents research findings on the effectiveness of public participation in SEA from expert interviews and an international online survey. The findings indicate that current SEA practice remains limited in all three dimensions, with particularly little emphasis on the public's influence. The paper reflects on these enduring challenges, to further debates and practice on more transparent and inclusive assessments and decisions.