Meaningful social impact information vital for our communities

We expect our decision-makers to make well-informed and responsible choices that benefit our communities. How can we measure the social impact this has? Jenni Greig has spent the last few years finding out.

“They just don’t understand what this will do to people like me”

We’ve all heard something like this, or thought it ourselves, in response to a decision that has been made that will cause some kind of change in a community. Many bodies can be inserted as the faceless “they”: politicians, bureaucrats, policy makers at any level of government, or even businesses and service providers. It doesn’t really matter who is making the decision, as much as it matters what is going to happen to me, my family, and my community.

One of the perks of living in a democratic society is that we can expect that our decision-makers, particularly those using, or affecting the public and our collective resources, will make choices which benefit people. We also expect them to make responsible, well-informed decisions, with a good understanding of possible outcomes, and not just guesses about what might happen. We want them to weigh up all the likely consequences, good and bad, to the economy, the environment, and to us as individuals, families and communities.

Simple, right?

Not really. Lots of time and energy has gone into developing ways to evaluate decisions in advance of those decisions actually being made. We have many tools to examine economic and environmental outcomes, but methods of weighing up outcomes for people as social beings (otherwise known as “social impacts”) have not been as thoroughly developed. Previously, we’ve only been able to measure social impacts using broad data that indicate social trends, like number of jobs, unemployment rates, and in- and out-migration. This is all important to understand, but leaves something to be desired when we think about all the dimensions of humans as social beings.

When I talk about social impacts, what I mean is “… the consequences to human populations of any public or private actions – that alter the ways in which people live, work, play, relate to one another, organize to meet their needs, and generally cope as members of society. The term also includes cultural impacts involving changes to the norms, values, and beliefs that guide and rationalise their cognition of themselves and their society” (ICPG, 2003).

It is a big ask of our decision-makers to take all of this into account, and we need to develop tools to support this kind of well-informed evaluation of options. We need methods that can integrate into tools that are already used, such as cost-benefit analysis (CBA).

It is for this reason that I’ve spent the last few years researching how we can gather social impact information to support decision making. I found that there are a number of key aspects of life and community dynamics – twelve to be precise – which are related to wellbeing that we can measure to understand social impacts. Things like how financially secure a person feels, how invested they are in their local community, and the extent to which their relationships meet a variety of relational needs are key indicators of their wellbeing. By measuring the change people experience in these aspects in response to a change in their community, we can get an estimate of social impacts. People can also estimate the change they are likely to experience in these twelve aspects in a hypothetical future.

Some 25 years ago, it was pointed out that “impacts do not cease to exist if they are simply ignored”, (Gramling and Freudenburg, 1992, p. 231) and certainly our public decision-makers have made considerable efforts to understand social impacts. The issue in 1992 was that “the full range of social impacts have been not so much beyond our control as beyond our concepts” (ibid.).  I would argue that measuring key social impacts is now within our concepts, that it is possible to estimate how different people are affected by change, as well as a whole community.

The challenge, as I see it, is to keep the momentum, developing our ability to incorporate thorough, personally meaningful social impact information in our existing decision-making tools. A substantial first step has been made. Let’s keep going.

References

ICPG Interorganizational Committee on Principles and Guidelines for Social Impact Assessment. (2003). Principles and guidelines for social impact assessment in the USA. Impact Assessment & Project Appraisal, 21(3), 231-250.

Gramling, R. & Freudenburg, W. R. (1992). Opportunity-threat, development, and adaptation: Toward a comprehensive framework for social impact assessment. Rural Sociology, 57(2), 216-234.