Choreography of sustainable development

From 27 to 29 October 2025, The Netherlands Commission for Environmental Assessment (NCEA) organised a meeting in Senegal. A few dozen long-time partners from ten West African countries, the ECOWAS, the UEMOA (both West African unions) and several river basin authorities came together. These policymakers represented authorities for mining, energy, maritime affairs, agriculture, water management and environment. They discussed how they integrate sustainability issues into their development planning. The cases which they discussed illustrate how a procedure like Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) may successfully stimulate integration, making policies of different authorities more coherently support societal transitions.

This blog is my interpretation of what has happened in that week in Senegal. It describes how informal leaders try to use Strategic Environmental Assessment to accelerate sustainable reform, as SEA is perhaps the only procedure that enables them. They try to widen the scope for implementation power in the SEA process, and they try to make collaboration more pro-active. It is like contemporary dance.

The confusion between procedure and process and its link to ambition

The NCEA’s partners who participated in Senegal apply Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) to integrate knowledge about impacts in the planning of their policies, plans and programmes (‘plans’).

However, they did not all give the concept of ‘SEA’ the same meaning. After some confusion, participants discovered their differences. Some participants, referring to SEA, were referring to the legal SEA procedure and what must be done to comply. Other participants referred to the process that the procedure enables, but which itself is not regulated in the procedure: what could be done – more than just comply.

This difference in interpretations of SEA reflected a difference in ambition. Many who thought of SEA as a process focused on its potential to have a strategic influence on plans, enabling a sustainable development. This is more than just mitigating adverse social and environmental effects by putting in place norms and standards. Many considered such strategic influence of SEA helpful to address the huge development challenges in West Africa, which include food security, energy security, water security, employment, and preventing conflict and migration, for all citizens, with respect for nature, and in a changing climate. Such sustainable development is not a matter of mitigation only: it requires completely different plans. Then, complying with the SEA procedure is not enough: it is the way in which it is practised and which cannot be regulated: the SEA process.

Who plans? Who assesses?

The differences in ambition became apparent in the exchanges of experiences between the participants. Eighteen participants presented their own case and their remaining challenges.

The SEA procedure was clear from the start of the meeting. It mandates governments to compare alternatives for specific plans before making any decision, and to communicate that assessment as a fact base with a draft plan to enable public debate. Responsible governments must do the comparison of alternatives in concertation with stakeholders. The formal actors in the procedure are planning authorities, SEA authorities and the stakeholders or the public that must be involved. In West Africa, there usually is also an obligation that planning authorities must hire consultants to perform the SEA, and that these consultants must be certified by the SEA authority. The planning, however, remains responsibility of the planning authorities, like ministries for infrastructure.

More or less successful examples of SEAs having strategic influence in West Africa related for example to natural gas production, maritime zoning, integrated rural development, and mining. Many were aware that this influence was not only thanks to the SEA procedure as such, but even more to the choices the formal actors made in the context of the procedure. The SEA process depends on individual choices and behaviour that lead to different interactions between the formal actors. Depending on these interactions SEA was argued to potentially have a profound influence on development. Plans often can have wide-scale impacts if implemented well (for which robust follow-up arrangements must be part of the plan). Plans bind their signatories to use their power to intervene in the market and in society to influence human activities. If the government wants to be trustworthy to its stakeholders, plans create expectations and make governments accountable.

However, it becomes a mess if there are many authorities all making their own plans without looking for coherence between them. This is why many participants believed that SEA may help to integrate cross-cutting issues, sustainability, into plans and into their implementation.

Integrated planning

Participants were aware that for complex development challenges, several ministries must attune their interventions – and therefore they must not only align their fact bases (the problem description, proposed developments, their impacts and their alternatives described in SEAs) but also draw conclusions from these facts together, in their respective plans. This would make different plans coherent and even synergetic. They could also make one integrated plan signed by all.

But the SEA procedure – nor any planning procedure – cannot prescribe how this must be done. It is a choice of the actors. Attuning, aligning, synchronizing, coherency, co-creation, co-construction: these more or less synonyms are all used for integrating sustainability considerations into planning (the UN’s global goals were mentioned to illustrate the scope for considerations). The way in which this can be done depends on the institutional and political context. One can learn from voluntary practices elsewhere. Procedure perhaps, but not process, can be copied from one context to another. Many types of processes may be legitimate, but have very different outcomes. All successful in their own way, but not all having the same profound influence on development.

In West Africa SEA processes differ on two dimensions

Participants at the meeting in Senegal appeared to have different types of SEA processes in mind when they apply the procedure, and therefore they behave differently as actors complying with the procedure. They appeared to differ on two dimensions: first, whether the scope for alternatives must be narrow or wide. Second, whether the process must start with plan proposals before assessment or rather start with joint assessment before making plan proposals.

The first dimension: scope for implementation power

In West Africa, SEA processes with a narrow scope for alternatives are focused on what the minister of environment can decide and, in the follow up of the plan, enforce. The measures are listed in a ‘framework environmental and social management plan’, that is part of the SEA (not of the plan). The SEA is approved by the minister of environment.

Upside of a narrow scope is that it barely depends on collaboration – as long as the approved measures do not hurt the beneficiaries of the plan too much. Downside of a narrow scope is that it makes no sense to analyse alternative plans outside the power of the environment minister. And often this power is limited, even if plan alternatives might have the political backing of groups who are negatively affected by the plan. Still, the narrow scope can be a major leap forward compared to ‘no SEA’. This was the case for a natural gas production case. It delivered high environmental and social standards for the sector, but it did not consider impacts on the national transition to a secure and sustainable energy system. This case also shows that even with a narrow scope for alternatives the environment minister depends on some collaboration with the energy minister who does not want to scare investors away with an overly demanding environmental framework.

An SEA with a wide scope was the sustainable development programme for a rural area. The local communities in this area shared natural resources. They joined in a temporary committee to make this plan together. In the SEA, they identified their population’s objectives for sustainable development, which related mainly to natural resources management, agricultural production and employment – taking population growth and climate change into consideration. Whilst the committee was authority for the plan, the ministry of environment and its interministerial committee were the authority for the SEA. The environmental and social measures were fully integrated into the planning process, and by approving the SEA as sound justification, the state gave legitimacy to the plan which as a whole gave direction to sustainable development.

The second dimension: how to start collaborative governance

On this dimension the most reactive extreme was that there were two teams: the planners and the assessors. The planners submitted a draft plan to the assessors who proposed mitigative measures. Less reactive but still not purely proactive is that these two teams have more than just one iteration of draft planning and assessment. Still, in each iteration, the planners are first and then the assessors react. In these reactive models, plan alternatives must fall in the power of the planning authority that triggered the SEA, like a minister of mining. This makes the scope of alternatives more narrow, even if other authorities (water management, infrastructure, …) are consulted on the impacts of these alternatives.

The most proactive extreme on the collaboration dimension was the approach where there was only one technical team that combined assessors and planners. The team then starts not with a draft plan, but with a joined problem analysis. They create stepwise a plan together, in each step justifying choices they make at that stage by means of an assessment of options (co-creation). The planning choices made and the assessments that had justified these choices were recorded in the SEA, and used to overall justify the final draft plan that is submitted for adoption. The proactive approach enables to invite more authorities at the table to cocreate joint action from the start.

In the natural gas case above, the ministries of energy (responsible for the plan) and environment (responsible for the SEA) invited other ministries that have relevant implementation powers, like the armed forces who were responsible for the enforcement of law at sea. During the stepwise process of analysis and planning, the co-creating authorities discovered who needed to do what to address their joint challenge. The outcome was not one joint plan, but different synergetic plans with different authorities – albeit based on the same SEA. It may seem paradoxical to call this a narrow-scope SEA, but the measures were still only aimed at mitigation of environmental and social impacts, and the environment ministry remained responsible for the oversight of all implementation. Even this needed complex collaboration.

The cost of proactive collaboration

In West Africa, administrations are not always capable of organizing the inter-ministerial collaboration, for example because they lack staff. And even then, they need support from consultants whom they often can hire only with the support of donors. This dependency gives donors the opportunity to decide where SEAs will be done ‘wide and proactive’. This loss of country ownership in some cases could lead to hidden conflicts between countries and their donors. Given the lack of capacity related to the enormous development challenges of West Africa, the participants did not agree what has priority: getting environmental norms and the enforcement of these norms straight in many sectors of planning, or investing their time in fewer wider proactive processes needed to cocreate sustainable economic reforms in fewer sectors.

Three combinations occurred in practice

The two dimensions of SEA processes combined deliver three extreme combinations that occur in the countries in the Senegal meeting: 1) narrow and reactive, with many examples, 2) narrow and proactive (e.g., the natural gas case), and 3) wide and proactive (e.g., the rural development  case). The 4th combination did not occur, which is to be expected because it might make little sense to invest in identifying wide alternatives without engaging the responsible planners proactively to ensure their ownership for these alternatives.

All combinations apply a similar legal procedure for SEA. The SEA procedure does not prescribe how the process must be organised on these dimensions. What happens depends on the benefit of making an SEA wide and / or proactive as weighed against the cost of putting the required capacity in place.

Integrated planning as contemporary dance: rules-based improvisation can be learned by doing

At the end of the day, informal leadership in the administrations may be the decisive factor where it is possible to organize an SEA process ‘wide and proactive’. Cases show how groups of unsolicited civil servants convinced their leading politicians and donors alike to make capacity available for wider and more proactive SEA. As it was unsolicited, their initial preparatory efforts were informal. Their persuasiveness seems to increase through their ability to explain to decision-makers in several ministries not only the SEA procedure, but also the kind of collaborative process they envisage. It is my impression that the meeting in Senegal added to this ability: the participants have learned by doing and by jointly reflecting.

Wide and proactive collaboration is like a different choreography. While a narrow and reactive SEA might be like disco dancing (everybody makes their own moves without considering the others), a wide but still reactive SEA is more like line dancing (one ministry is in front and the others obey according to a pecking order). A wide and proactive SEA is more like contemporary dance (dancers agree on room for improvisation to inspire each other with minimal rules). Success therefore depends not just on following rules, but also on improvising in a creative process where the dancers make the rules themselves and can change them together. That process – as every situation is different  – cannot be completely structured by a generic legal procedure, nor even by an ad hoc procedure to address one specific sustainability challenge. Such procedures are only a platform where the creative dance can take place. It also depends on informal leadership to start the dance without a top-down initiative from the hierarchy first, and to inspire people from other hierarchies to join, bring in their bodies and mind, as they discover new interdependencies in co-creation.

SEA might be the only procedure that stimulates proactive collaboration

In West Africa, the SEA procedure seems to be the only formal platform for wide, proactive processes, legitimizing this ‘collaborative’ choreography. Without any procedure at all, informal leadership by civil servants to collaborate proactively, even to unsollicitly co-design an ad hoc procedure to submit to their hierarchies, is often seen as illegitimate or unheard of. The cases presented in Senegal included: landscape effects of the cocoa value chain, intensive rice cultivation, decentral rural planning, multi-level rural planning, natural gas development, land reform, maritime zoning, flood risk management, coastal zone management, mining, dams, and green hydrogen development. Several cases had transboundary aspects. The potential effect on sustainable development is huge.

If we can learn to dance, we can learn to collaborate for sustainable development.

This blog was not reviewed by the participants in Senegal. Therefore it is anonymized.

Written by: Sibout Nooteboom
Picture: Collection Hans Nooteboom