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Enhancing disaster risk reduction (DRR) and community resilience are fundamental for sustainable development. However, cultural and political-institutional barriers hinder governments from progressing towards sustainability. We propose a redesign of social impact assessment (SIA) to make it more applicable to the field of regional and urban planning, and we discuss the role SIA can have in enhancing community resilience to achieve DRR and sustainable development in localities. We argue that, to convert SIA into a tool that can inform regional recovery and development planning, a rethinking of SIA and of the role of SIA practitioners is needed. We therefore expound the SIA Framework for Action and we enhance it to be a community-based process focussed on informing regional policies and plans and decisions about the projects to be included in such plans. Application of the SIA Framework for Action will help governments overcome the barriers to DRR and sustainable development.

Enhancing disaster risk reduction (DRR) and community resilience are fundamental for sustainable development. However, cultural and political-institutional barriers hinder governments from progressing towards sustainability. We propose a redesign of social impact assessment (SIA) to make it more applicable to the field of regional and urban planning, and we discuss the role SIA can have in enhancing community resilience to achieve DRR and sustainable development in localities. We argue that, to convert SIA into a tool that can inform regional recovery and development planning, a rethinking of SIA and of the role of SIA practitioners is needed. We therefore expound the SIA Framework for Action and we enhance it to be a community-based process focussed on informing regional policies and plans and decisions about the projects to be included in such plans. Application of the SIA Framework for Action will help governments overcome the barriers to DRR and sustainable development.

Social impact assessment can greatly contribute to sustainable regional and urban planning. However, social impact assessment is used primarily in the context of pre-determined projects, while social impact assessment’s role in informing regional and urban plans before projects are even conceived is under-estimated. Moreover, a narrow understanding of the social impacts of projects leads social impact assessment practitioners to consider such impacts as being the outcomes only of the technical characteristics and risks of projects and their implementation, rather than also of broader social, cultural and political-institutional processes. In this article, we reflect on these gaps in social impact assessment. We expand the conceptualization of the social impacts of projects to better consider how social impacts are also influenced by the social dimensions of risk and resilience, and by the knowledge processes and governance strategies that inform and regulate projects. We conceptualize these processes and strategies and design new conceptual models to derive the social impacts of projects. Finally, we reflect on the strategic role social impact assessment can have in enabling social learning and sustainability transformation in localities (i.e. community resilience) and across multiple governance levels (i.e. social resilience). With this article, we contribute to building a key role for social impact assessment in disaster risk reduction, climate action and sustainable development.

The discourse on the social impacts of tourism needs to shift from the current descriptive critique of tourism to considering what can be done in actual practice to embed the management of tourism's social impacts into the existing planning, product development and operational processes of tourism businesses. A pragmatic approach for designing research methodologies, social management systems and initial actions, which is shaped by the real world operational constraints and existing systems used in the tourism industry, is needed. Our pilot study with a small Bulgarian travel company put social impact assessment (SIA) to the test to see if it could provide this desired approach and assist in implementing responsible tourism development practice, especially in small tourism businesses. Our findings showed that our adapted SIA method has value as a practical method for embedding a responsible tourism approach. While there were some challenges, SIA proved to be effective in assisting the staff of our test case tourism business to better understand their social impacts on their local communities and to identify actions to take.

Internationally, extension has been a support instrument used by governments and commercial interests for improving agricultural production for hundreds, if not thousands of years. The application of extension theory and practice for natural resource management (NRM) is a more recent undertaking. However, over the last 20+ years, agencies sponsoring extension services appear to have lost confidence in extension’s ability to achieve desired outcomes. In Australia, Greg Leach’s PhD research has sought to understand the barriers and bottlenecks which have prevented the implementation of extension policy by the Queensland State Government. His research enquired into the institutionalisation of extension in Queensland, as well as approaches and mechanisms for negotiating extension policy at the national scale from 2000 to 2010. Learnings from the author’s involvement in operationalising a network of extension leaders from across Australia, underpin broader recommendations on institutionalising extension policy, and advice for extension policy to aid achievement of NRM outcomes.

Traditional expert (or technocratic) approaches to Technology Assessment have been fundamentally challenged by two observations. The first is that social impacts are not side effects of technology; they are core dimensions of new technology and technological development, and are a function of the coproduction of technology and society. As such, they can only be understood in social, not technical terms. Secondly, technological developments are driven by particular visions for society that are normative. Because these visions (and the latent premises that underpin them) are implicit and not negotiated by society, they are, in effect, undemocratic. Participatory methods have been utilized by Technology Assessment to improve the evaluation of the social and ethical dimensions of technology, and to democratize decision making about science and technology. However, we argue that public participation on its own does not necessarily lead to deeper understandings of social effects, nor necessarily to democratic input into decision making. We therefore make a case for a new form of Technology Assessment which we call TASC - Technology Assessment in Social Context. It takes a constructive, social systems approach to assess technology in social context and seeks to shape technology and social contexts through information, interaction and dialogue.

Australian agriculture is in crisis, the terms of trade for agriculture are falling, many farmers have negative incomes, and there is massive structural adjustment with government policy assisting the exit of marginal farmers out of agriculture. Australian governments are gripped with the philosophy of economic rationalism. This creates a policy environment of reduced commitment to government funding for agriculture, a reduction in agricultural extension services and a government that is opposed, in principle, to regulatory and incentive based approaches to environmental management. Thus there is a period of considerable change in agricultural extension services as they attempt to deal with these changed circumstances. At the same time as these crises in agriculture and in agricultural extension, there is an increased need for effective agricultural extension because of increasing levels of land degradation in Australia. Increasing levels of salinity, acidity, soil structure decline, soil nutrient decline, erosion by wind and water, destruction of native habitat and wildlife, invasion of rangelands by woody weeds, and other environmental problems are of an unprecedented scale. The severity of enviromnental problems creates an enviromnental imperative for action for environmental management.However, the debate about environmental problems in agriculture has been dominated by technical discussion of the physical aspects of the problem, of the physical causes and of the physical solutions. In agricultural extension circles, the debate has been restricted to a discussion of how to get farmers to adopt environmental management practices. At no time has there been any consideration of the social foundation of agriculture, of the social, political and economic processes that have shaped Australian agriculture, or of the social, political and economic basis of environmental problems within agriculture. Agricultural extension agencies, despite the crises in which they curren

The conceptual framework based on environmental function evaluation of Slootweg et al. [Impact Assess. Proj. Appraisal 19 (2001) 19–28.] is used as the basis for conceptualising social impacts. Existing lists of social impact variables, such as those of the Interorganizational Committee for Guidelines and Principles for Social Impact Assessment, are examined and found to be inadequate and contradictory. A new listing of some 80-odd indicative social impacts is developed reflecting a change from project-based thinking to inclusion of the impacts of policies and programs, from thinking only about negative impacts to including positive benefits, and from thinking about unintended consequences to including intended consequences. The importance of differentiating between social impacts and social change processes is highlighted. Many of the variables typically measured in social impact assessment (SIA) studies are not in themselves impacts, but rather represent the measurable outcomes of social change processes, which may or may not cause impacts depending on the situation. Caution is expressed in the use of the list of impacts as a checklist.

Van der Ploeg’s ‘styles of farming’ approach attempts to explain the social nature of diversity in agriculture. For over 10 years we have attempted to apply this concept to a range of farming situations in Australia. This article reviews the issues posed by Vanclay et al. in 1998 and provides insight into what have been the developments in the concept of farming styles. We utilise the results of three studies in Australia: a study of farming styles in broadacre cropping and grazing farmers in the Riverina region of New South Wales; a study of grape growers in the Sunraysia district of Victoria and a separate study of grape growers across south-eastern Australia. While this research was intended to validate the existence of styles and to provide evidence of the usefulness of the concept and its application in rural industries, we were unable to replicate or validate van der Ploeg’s original conceptualisation and methodology.We conclude that farming styles are more of an intellectual construction than a social construction. Nevertheless, we believe that the concept of farming styles is a useful heuristic and a new framework for understanding farming styles is presented.

Fourteen styles of viticulture are defined: Astute Business Grower; Experimentalist Grower; Industry-Endorsed Early Adopter; Professional Scientific Manager; Experienced Manager; Labour-Efficient Grower; Low-Input Sustainable Agriculture Grower; Traditional Grower; Ethnic Grower; Conventional Grower; Retiree Grower; Hobby Grower; Sea-Change Grower; and Marginal Grower. The methodology to identify these farming styles included 6 focus groups in Mildura, Victoria, a face-to-face interview with 142 grape-growers in the Sunraysia region of Victoria, and qualitative interviewing with industry personnel and extension staff. Problems of social desirability response bias, the lack of self-identification by growers with styles, and literacy and other methodological issues meant that qualitative, participatory (emic) methods for identifying styles were not reliable. Following considerable immersion in the field, the researchers identified, on the basis of expert judgment (etic classification), the 14 farming styles in viticulture which they regard as a typology of ideal types. Benefits of the identification of farming styles in viticulture in terms of extension are discussed.

The "International Principles for Social Impact Assessment" is a statement of the core values of the SIA community together with a set of principles to guide SIA practice and the consideration of 'the social' in environmental impact assessment generally. It is a discussion document for the impact assessment community to be used as the basis for developing sector and national guidelines. In the process of being developed explicitly for an international context, increasing pressure was placed on the conventional understanding of SIA and a new definition, with official imprimatur of an international professional body, has been formalised. "Social Impact Assessment includes the processes of analysing, monitoring and managing the intended and unintended social consequences, both positive and negative, of planned interventions (policies, programs, plans, projects) and any social change processes invoked by those interventions. Its primary purpose is to bring about a more sustainable and equitable biophysical and human environment."

An understanding of social issues, the social nature of farming, and the social basis of adoption is needed if agricultural extension is to be effective in addressing natural resource management issues, and in promoting sustainability in its triple bottom line conceptualisation. Twenty-seven principles are presented here, with the key principles being: awareness offarming as a social activity; recognition ofthe social diversity offarmers and the social drivers in agriculture; and the socio-cultural basis of adoption.

Fourteen styles of viticulture are defined: Astute Business Grower; Experimentalist Grower; Industry-Endorsed Early Adopter; Professional Scientific Manager; Experienced Manager; Labour-Efficient Grower; Low-Input Sustainable Agriculture Grower; Traditional Grower; Ethnic Grower; Conventional Grower; Retiree Grower; Hobby Grower; Sea-Change Grower; and Marginal Grower. The methodology to identify these farming styles included 6 focus groups in Mildura, Victoria, a face-to-face interview with 142 grape-growers in the Sunraysia region of Victoria, and qualitative interviewing with industry personnel and extension staff. Problems of social desirability response bias, the lack of self-identification by growers with styles, and literacy and other methodological issues meant that qualitative, participatory (emic) methods for identifying styles were not reliable. Following considerable immersion in the field, the researchers identified, on the basis of expert judgment (etic classification), the 14 farming styles in viticulture which they regard as a typology of ideal types. Benefits of the identification of farming styles in viticulture in terms of extension are discussed.