Scale and Strategy in Environmental Assessment of Regional Development Policies

Abstract

Since the 1970s multiple research efforts around the world have focused on identifying potential environmental, economic, and social impacts of development. It is well understood that local project assessment approaches fail to identify, or worse quantify, indirect or cumulative effects, when they do not provide an appropriate baseline framework to understand the local and the regional environment as a connected entity. A conceptual approach based on several environmental assessment and spatial analysis tools suggests that we need to consider multi-scale methods that can help describe the different processes that occur within a region. This would help project managers and researchers to better evaluate ongoing regional policies by retrieving a wide characterization of the application and impacts of policies within the whole geographical spectrum. Within each policy assessment, these methods could evolve into a framework for environmental management practices at both local and regional scales that could be updated with new information through time. We analyze two regional policy case studies: poverty targeting in Sri Lanka, and payments for ecosystem services in Costa Rica.