Before embarking on broad dissemination of the idea to establish the ICIA, consultation has shown that careful thinking on and detailed description of form and functions of the proposed ICIA is required to allay suspicion about its functioning and resistance against its operation. It made clear that there is a need to slightly modify the concept that was originally formulated by the Brundtland Commission. The consultations have led to the following assumptions for the set-up:
1) No overlap
The ICIA will complement national institutions that carry out their own national system of impact assessment and will not replace such institutions. The ICIA is – and has to be seen to be – complementary to these national institutions. Also, as to our knowledge, there is no specific body that provides the world wide services the proposed ICIA would provide and no other initiative is known that plans to establish such a body.
In order to make use of existing experience in preparing independent advice, the ICIA in its phase of estab-lishment might want to call upon the expertise of existing institutions.
2) Serve but avoid being (mis)used
The ICIA would serve the general interest world wide. The ICIA would not lend itself to be used to serve the interests of specific groups of stakeholders.
Independence would be the ‘raison d’être’ of the ICIA. Leaving opportunity to use the ICIA to serve group interests would immediately kill the initiative.
a) The ICIA would have to be a membership organisation open to country governments, multilateral bodies, including funding agencies, enterprises and their organisations, NGOs and funds that favour environmental care and social justice. Only members of the ICIA would be allowed to call upon its services.
The ICIA would accept to respect the principle of sovereignty of countries and the principle that the government represents the country. Therefore, in cases where a government decides on project, programme or policy-approval for which Impact Assessments are made under national law, advice of the ICIA could only be asked by the government itself or with the written consent of the government(s) involved (and only if that government would be member of the ICIA). This limitation prevents that governments are confronted against their will with opinions of the ICIA in cases under their authority. It also provides governments that do not want to use the services of the ICIA with the means to resist pressures to do so.
b) The ICIA would provide a judgement on the completeness and the quality of the information in the Impact Assessments that are prepared to support decision-making. It would refrain from giving a judgement on the social and environmental acceptability of the intended project, programme or policy. ICIA would consider decision-making the competence of the competent authority.
In many countries EIA reports provide a combination of objective information on environmental and social impacts and (inherently subjective) judgements on the importance of the impact assessed and, more in general, on the environmental and social acceptability of the initiative. The ICIA would only address the quality and completeness of the objective information. This limitation would provide the ICIA with the necessary safeguard against becoming a party in the political debate. Prior to formulating its advisory report, the ICIA would adhere to all good practices of EIA like consultation with the competent authorities, the proponent and the general public.
c) In acting as an independent advisor the ICIA would respond to:
i) requests for advice on (scoping for and review of) Impact Assessment reports in cases national legal procedures apply. In these cases the advice of the ICIA would be published.
Scoping and reviewing will be the major field of activity of the ICIA. For the sake of clarity, it must be emphasized that the ICIA will not prepare impact statements itself.
ii) requests for advice on (scoping for and review of) impact assessment in the earliest stages of conception of proposals before the start-up of (national) legal procedures. In these cases its advice would be confidential and could not be published or disseminated otherwise.
Private companies and banks have expressed the need of having an independent judgement of the quality and completeness of the information on the social and environmental impacts of their intended investment plans before they engage in formal procedures. The inability to publish the judgement of the ICIA would limit its use to pre-project internal decision making.
iii) other requests could be considered provided that they would be in line with the intentions and mandate of the ICIA and would not put at risk the fulfilling of its primary functions.
3) A least cost - maximum flexibility concept
There is general resistance against the creation of new large scale administrative structures. The ICIA structure would be kept as ‘lean’ and low cost as possible. Therefore:
a) The ICIA would have a secretariat headed by a director. The functioning of the secretariat would be overseen by a board elected by and representing the membership.
In principle the ICIA secretariat could start its activities with a staff of some four persons. It would grow at a rate commensurate with the use the members would like to make of it.
b) The ICIA would address the requests for advice with working groups of experts. The secretariat would, on a project by project basis, appoint and engage the required ex-pertise from all over the world.
In this way all expertise on a world-wide basis can be made available in a highly cost-effective way. There would be no experts on the permanent payroll. Their payment would be based on a prefixed professional fee, disbursed only for time spent to formulate the advisory report. Payments would, of course, include travel expenses and daily subsistence allowance. |
