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EA and strategic capacity

At the annual conference of the International Association for Impact Assessment in Bologna (1-4 may 2025), Sibout Nooteboom will present a paper on the link between environmental assessment and strategic capacity. Sibout is a reflexive practitioner at the NCEA and associated with the Erasmus University of Rotterdam’s research group on public governance. His presentation will be based on three draft essays to be downloaded below. The paper nor the essays necessarily express the views of the NCEA or the Erasmus University.

Sibout will present the paper at the session Improving strategic environmental assessment practice in the EU and the wider world: Can AI help? on 3 May, 16.00 hours.

Both presentation and draft paper are based on essays on practical cases from Mali, Senegal, Guinea and the Netherlands that were published earlier for review. All views expressed are personal.

Draft paper: Making SEA Great Again with Artificial Intelligence
Today, sustainability issues seem to suffer from other global priorities that compete for attention. In that context it also may become more difficult to make Strategic Environmental Assessment matter as a tool for sustainable development planning. In this paper I review how Artificial Intelligence could make SEA strong again. In theory, AI might help humans to deal with the complexity of their development challenges. However, even if that is true, practice could be different than theory. To discover how AI might make SEA stronger, we must first understand what is needed for SEA to deal with complexity in the first place. I summarise the literature on SEA and complex decision-making to that end, deriving how AI could be useful in view of SEA’s goals.

 

You can download the essays here 👇👇👇. Enjoy reading!

Essay 1. Making SEA contribute to strategic capacity
The central hypothesis of this essay is that the main purpose of the SEA procedure is to increase our capacity of considering strategic alternatives to set transformative change in motion if we think that this is necessary for a sustainable development. That strategic capacity itself, however, is not SEA. It is connecting across our public – private governance system, engaging in joint fact finding.

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Essay 2. Using SEA to balance the powers that can transform our development
The central hypothesis of this essay is that powerful actors can use SEA ‘charitably in their own interest’. As long as power imbalance remains pervasive, dominant actors can give otherwise dominated actors more influence, knowing that in the long term ‘we all depend on each other’. Some agencies are specialised ‘quasi-charities’.

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Essay 3. Making SEA stronger with Artificial Intelligence
The central hypothesis of this essay is that if Artificial Intelligence is to make SEA stronger, AI foremost must increase our strategic capacity. Not make the powerful more powerful.

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Draft paper: Making SEA Great Again with Artificial Intelligence
In this paper I review how Artificial Intelligence could make SEA strong again. In theory, AI might help humans to deal with the complexity of their development challenges.

Download paper

‘Can AI make Strategic Environmental Assessment stronger?’
Presentation that will be given at IAIA25, with practical cases from Africa.

Download presentation